Balancing Security and Performance for Agility in Dynamic Threat Environments

Abstract

In cyber security, achieving the desired balance between system security and system performance in dynamic threat environments is a long-standing open challenge for cyber defenders. Typically an increase in system security comes at the price of decreased system performance, and vice versa, easily resulting in systems that are misaligned to operator specified requirements for system security and performance as the threat environment evolves. We develop an online, reinforcement learning based methodology to automatically discover and maintain desired operating postures in security-performance space even as the threat environment changes. We demonstrate the utility of our approach and discover parameters enabling an agile response to a dynamic adversary in a simulated security game involving prototype cyber moving target defenses.