Collaborative Attack vs. Collaborative Defense

We have witnessed many attacks in the cyberspace. However, most attacks are launched by individual attackers even though an attack may involve many compromised computers. In this paper, we envision what we believe to be the next generation cyber attacks — collaborative attacks. Collaborative attacks can be launched by multiple attackers (i.e., human attackers or criminal organizations), each of which may have some specialized expertise. This is possible because cyber attacks can become very sophisticated and specialization of attack expertise naturally becomes relevant. To counter collaborative attacks, we might need collaborative defense because each “chain” in a collaborative attack may be only adequately dealt with by a different defender. In order to understand collaborative attack and collaborative defense, we present a high-level abstracted framework for evaluating the effectiveness of collaborative defense against collaborative attacks. As a first step towards realizing and instantiating the framework, we explore a characterization of collaborative attacks and collaborative defense from the relevant perspectives.