Reference Architecture of an Autonomous Agent for Cyber Defense of Complex Military Systems

Military strategies will shortly make intensive use of autonomous systems while the Internet of Battle Things (IoBT) will grow military systems’ complexity to new heights. The cyber defense of the battlespace will then become arduous for humans, if not impossible, due to disconnections, the difficulty of supervising masses of interconnected devices, and the scarcity of cyber defense competences on the battleground. An autonomous intelligent cyber defense of the battlefield becomes necessary in such a context. In response to such needs, this chapter presents and illustrates the rationale, concept and future research directions of (Multiple) Autonomous Intelligent Cyber defense Agents, (M)AICA, and NATO’s initial AICA Reference Architecture, AICARA.

[1]  Sheila B. Banks,et al.  Toward Using Intelligent Agents to Detect, Assess, and Counter Cyberattacks in a Network-Centric Environment , 2005 .

[2]  Salvatore J. Stolfo,et al.  Baiting Inside Attackers Using Decoy Documents , 2009, SecureComm.

[3]  Darragh O'Brien,et al.  Machine Learning for Automatic Defence Against Distributed Denial of Service Attacks , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[4]  Ananthram Swami,et al.  Distillation as a Defense to Adversarial Perturbations Against Deep Neural Networks , 2015, 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP).

[5]  Hyacinth S. Nwana,et al.  Software agents: an overview , 1996, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[6]  Galen C. Hunt,et al.  Shielding Applications from an Untrusted Cloud with Haven , 2014, OSDI.

[7]  Ralph Johnson,et al.  design patterns elements of reusable object oriented software , 2019 .

[8]  Grady Booch,et al.  Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications , 1990 .

[9]  S.D.J. McArthur,et al.  Multi-Agent Systems for Power Engineering Applications—Part I: Concepts, Approaches, and Technical Challenges , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.

[10]  Emmett Witchel,et al.  InkTag: secure applications on an untrusted operating system , 2013, ASPLOS '13.

[11]  Wilfried Elmenreich,et al.  Intelligent Methods in Embedded Systems , 2003, WISES.

[12]  Krzysztof Rzadca,et al.  An introductory preview of Autonomous Intelligent Cyber-defense Agent reference architecture, release 2.0 , 2020 .

[13]  Elizabeth Bodine-Baron,et al.  Improving the Cybersecurity of U.S. Air Force Military Systems Throughout Their Life Cycles , 2015 .

[14]  Demis Hassabis,et al.  Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge , 2017, Nature.

[15]  Jean-Pierre Müller,et al.  Emergence of Collective Behaviour and Problem Solving , 2003, ESAW.

[16]  Kenneth D. Forbus,et al.  AI on the battlefield: an experimental exploration , 2002, AAAI/IAAI.

[17]  David Šišlák,et al.  AgentFly: Scalable, High‐Fidelity Framework for Simulation, Planning and Collision Avoidance of Multiple UAVs , 2012 .

[18]  Kenneth D. Forbus,et al.  Incorporating AI into Military Decision Making: An Experiment , 2003, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[19]  Krzysztof Rzadca,et al.  Autonomous Intelligent Cyber-defense Agent (AICA) Reference Architecture, Release 2.0 , 2019 .

[20]  Niels Provos,et al.  A Virtual Honeypot Framework , 2004, USENIX Security Symposium.

[21]  Bo Chen,et al.  A Review of the Applications of Agent Technology in Traffic and Transportation Systems , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[22]  Jean-Paul Jamont,et al.  A multiagent approach to manage communication in wireless instrumentation systems , 2010 .

[23]  Jules Pagna Disso,et al.  A Plausible Solution to SCADA Security Honeypot Systems , 2013, 2013 Eighth International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications.

[24]  Sushil Jajodia,et al.  AHEAD: A New Architecture for Active Defense , 2016, SafeConfig@CCS.

[25]  J. Yuill,et al.  Honeyfiles: deceptive files for intrusion detection , 2004, Proceedings from the Fifth Annual IEEE SMC Information Assurance Workshop, 2004..

[26]  Michal Pechoucek,et al.  Industrial deployment of multi-agent technologies: review and selected case studies , 2008, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[27]  J. I. Escudero,et al.  Multi-Agent and Embedded System Technologies Applied to Improve the Management of Power Systems , 2010, J. Digit. Content Technol. its Appl..

[28]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Intelligent agents: theory and practice , 1995, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[29]  Karim Eldefrawy.  SMART: Secure and Minimal Architecture for (Establishing a Dynamic) Root of Trust , 2012, NDSS 2012.

[30]  Roberto Di Pietro,et al.  Energy efficient node-to-node authentication and communication confidentiality in wireless sensor networks , 2006, Wirel. Networks.

[31]  Peter Norvig,et al.  Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach , 1995 .

[32]  K. Weick.  The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster , 1993 .

[33]  Mauro Conti,et al.  SANA: Secure and Scalable Aggregate Network Attestation , 2016, CCS.

[34]  Roberto Di Pietro,et al.  Random key-assignment for secure Wireless Sensor Networks , 2003, SASN '03.

[35]  Jean-Paul Jamont,et al.  A framework to simulate and support the design of distributed automation and decentralized control systems: Application to control of indoor building comfort , 2011, Computational Intelligence in Control and Automation (CICA).

[36]  Michal Pechoucek,et al.  Towards Simulation-Aided Design of Multi-Agent Systems , 2010, ProMAS.