Numerical Evaluation of Job Finish Time under MTD Environment

Abstract

Moving target defense (MTD) has recently emerged as a game-changer in the confrontation between cyberattack and defense. MTD mechanism constantly and randomly changes the system configurations to create uncertainty of the attack surface against cyber-adversaries. To date, researches on the evaluation of MTD techniques either focused on analyzing the effectiveness of MTD or studying the system performance loss due to the use of MTD. The impact on job/service running on the protected system is always ignored. In this paper, we propose an SRN (Stochastic reward net) based analytical modeling approach to investigate how MTD techniques influence the job running on protected system from the perspective of job finish time. The SRN model developed in this paper captures the behaviors of both the adversary and the job execution process. Furthermore, we carry out numerical analysis to study the impact of different system parameters on job finish time and other evaluation metrics. The results in this paper can help defenders choose a better MTD configuration to complete the job execution as soon as possible.