Goal-Driven Deception Tactics Design

Abstract

Deception-based defense relies on intentional actions employed to induce erroneous inferences on attackers. Existing deception approaches are included in the software development process in an ad-hoc fashion, and are fundamentally realized as single tools or entire solutions repackaged as honeypot machines. We propose a systematic goal-driven approach to include deception tactics early in the software development process so that conflicts and risks can be found in the initial phases of the development, reducing costs of ill-planed decisions. The process integrates three phases: system modeling (producing a goal model of the application domain), security modeling (producing a threat model specifying the typical security concerns from the attacker perspective), and deception modeling (producing a deception tactic model, a variability model, and deception story models). The feasibility of the proposed approach is shown via a case study where deception defense strategies are designed for a students' presence control system for our University.