Information Assurance Cyber Ecology

Abstract

Abstract : Cyber Ecology is a systems-level discipline addressing the emergent properties of computer networks and their responses to perturbations, such as attacks. It is a cross-disciplinary synthesis incorporating elements of biology, epidemiology, ecology, computer science, and system engineering. In this work, methodologies from epidemiology and ecology were applied to information assurance. The goals of the Cyber Ecology project were to: (1) enable and demonstrate the discovery of noel IA technologies for the detection and mitigation of damage due to cyber attack through the application of ecological models, (2) design, develop, document, evaluate and deliver methodologies to assess the behavior of computer networks from attacks by infectious agents and direct attacks, and (3) develop and demonstrate methods to make system-level assessments about network health. The work in this report spans four major areas: (1) definition and scope of Cyber Ecology, (2) application of ecological concepts to the classification of malicious code, in which insider threat is briefly discussed, (3) epidemiological applications of Cyber Ecology, and 94) system health expressed as emergent properties that can be assessed through evaluation of network (community) structure.