A Learning-Based Approach to Reactive Security

作者：Barth Adam^*; Rubinstein Benjamin I P; Sundararajan Mukund; Mitchell John C; Song Dawn; Bartlett Peter L

来源：IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2012, 9(4): 482-493.

DOI：10.1109/2011.42

• Reactive security
• risk management
• attack graphs
• online learning
• adversarial learning
• game theory

Despite the conventional wisdom that proactive security is superior to reactive security, we show that reactive security can be competitive with proactive security as long as the reactive defender learns from past attacks instead of myopically overreacting to the last attack. Our game-theoretic model follows common practice in the security literature by making worst case assumptions about the attacker: we grant the attacker complete knowledge of the defender's strategy and do not require the attacker to act rationally. In this model, we bound the competitive ratio between a reactive defense algorithm (which is inspired by online learning theory) and the best fixed proactive defense. Additionally, we show that, unlike proactive defenses, this reactive strategy is robust to a lack of information about the attacker's incentives and knowledge.

• 出版日期2012-8
• 单位Microsoft