Design considerations for building cyber deception systems

Abstract

Cyber deception can become an essential component of organizing cyber operations in the modern cyber landscape. Cyber defenders and mission commanders can use cyber deception as an effective means for protecting mission cyber assets and ensuring mission success, through deceiving and diverting adversaries during the course of planning and execution of cyber operations and missions. To enable effective integration of cyber deception, it would be necessary to create a systematic design process for building a robust and sustainable deception system with extensible deception capabilities guided by a Command and Control interface compatible with current Department of Defense and civilian cyber operational practices and standards. In this chapter, the authors discuss various design aspects of designing cyber deception systems that meet a wide range of cyber operational requirements and are appropriately aligned with mission objectives. These design aspects include general deception goals, deception design taxonomy, tradeoff analysis, deception design process, design considerations such as modularity, interfaces and effect to cyber defenders, interoperability with current tools, deception scenarios, adversary engagement, roles of deception in cyber kill chains, and metrics such as adversary work factor. The authors expect to present the challenges and opportunities of designing cyber deception systems and to trigger further thoughts and discussions in the broader research community.