To Be Proactive or Not: A Framework to Model Cyber Maneuvers for Critical Path Protection in MANETs

Recently, proactive strategies have received much attention as they make a system more dynamic and difficult to predict, therefore reducing the impact of adversary attacks. In this paper, we aim at modeling and evaluating the effectiveness of proactive cyber maneuvers to protect the critical path between a source-destination pair for mission operations in a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) in the presence of an adversary. We propose a generic framework to analytically model cyber maneuvers and define their associated utilities. With the proposed framework, we develop the optimal solution to maximize the lifetime of the critical path with security assurance. We find that sufficient statistical information in the network is vital for the network defender to be proactive, choose the best cyber maneuvers to protect the critical path, and consequently outperform conventional reactive strategies. We also use simulations to validate the effectiveness of our solution.