Cyber regulatory networks: Towards a bio-inspired auto-resilient framework for cyber-defense

Abstract

After decades of deploying cyber-security systems, it has become a well-known fact that the existing cyber-security architecture has numerous inherent limitations that make the maintenance of the current network security devices unscalable and provide the adversary with asymmetric advantages. These limitations include: (1) difficulty in obtaining the global network picture due to lack of mutual interactions among heterogeneous network devices, (2) poor device self-awareness in current architectures, (3) error-prone and time consuming manual configuration which is not effective in real-time attack mitigation, (4) inability to diagnose misconfiguration and conflict resolution due to multi-party management of security infrastructure. In this paper, as an initial step to deal with these issues, we present a novel bio-inspired auto-resilient security architecture. The main contribution of this paper includes: (1) investigation of laws governing the dynamics of correct feedback control in Biological Regulatory Networks (BRNs), (2) studying their applicability for synthesizing correct models for bio-inspired communication networks, i.e. Firewall Regulatory Networks (FRNs), (3) verification of the formal models of real network scenarios, to prove the correctness of the proposed approach through model checking techniques.