Ants, To-Go: A Portable Demonstration of Large Infrastructure Cyber Defense

Abstract

Creating a self-organizing system of agents to defend large cyber infrastructures presents many challenges, one of which is demonstrating the system without trying to host it on a large real net-work of tens of thousands of machines. This abstract describes a portable demonstration of PNNL's Ant-Based Cyber Defense (ABCD) that can run on one or a few physical machines with sufficient resources. We have chosen to run the framework on hundreds of virtual machines whose number is limited only by the available memory and processing power. We collect the distributed logs and visualize the results on a large-scale visualization created to represent up to a million nodes. Our approach should be useful for other decentralized adaptive and self-organizing systems that span large numbers of physical machines.