In cyberspace attackers enjoy an advantage over defenders, which has popularized the concept of “active cyber defense”— offensive actions intended to punish or deter the adversary. This article argues active cyber defense is not a practical course of action to obtain tactical and strategic objectives. Instead, “aggressive cyber defense,” a proactive security solution, is a more appropriate opti...

An indispensable component of cyber security education is hands-on activities carried out in a lab to enable students to understand both offense and defense aspects of the cyber space. We describe our design and implementation of this course, and a resulting student organization Cyber Defense Club (CDC), at Kansas State University. Our 1.5-year experience in teaching this course and advising th...

The new cyber attack pattern of advanced persistent threats (APTs) poses a serious threat to cyberspace. This paper addresses the issue of defending against APTs in a cost-effective way. First, the APT-based cyber attack-defense processes are modeled as a type of differential dynamical systems. Then, the cyber defense problem is modeled as an optimal control problem. The optimal control problem...

This essay offers a broad view of active defense derived from the concept of active air and missile defense. This view admits a range of cyber defenses, many of which are widely deployed and considered essential in today’s threat environment. Instead of equating active defense to hacking back, this wider interpretation lends itself to distinguishing different types of active defense and the leg...

Internet users such as individuals and organizations are subject to different types of epidemic risks such as worms, viruses, spams, and botnets. To reduce the probability of risk, an Internet user generally invests in traditional security mechanisms like anti-virus and anti-spam software, sometimes also known as self-defense mechanisms. However, such software does not completely eliminate risk...

Cyber attacks have significantly increased over the last few years, where the attackers are highly skilled, more organized and supported by other powerful actors to devise attacks towards specific targets. To aid the development of a strategic plan to defend against emerging attacks, we present a high-level taxonomy along with a cyber defense model to address the interaction and relationships b...

The concept of active cyber defense has appeared in the literature in recent years. However, there are no mathematical models for characterizing the effectiveness of active cyber defense. In this paper, we fill the void by proposing a novel Markov process model that is native to the interaction between cyber attack and active cyber defense. Unfortunately, the native Markov process model cannot ...

In spite of the recognized challenge and importance of developing knowledge of the domain of cyber security, human-centered research to uncover and address the difficulties experienced by network defenders is to a large extent lacking. Such research is needed to influence the design of the joint systems facing cyber attacks. Network defense depends on the capacity to successfully identify, inve...

The present paper addresses an effective cyber defense model by applying information fusion based game theoretical approaches‎. ‎In the present paper, we are trying to improve previous models by applying stochastic optimal control and robust optimization techniques‎. ‎Jump processes are applied to model different and complex situations in cyber games‎. ‎Applying jump processes we propose some m...

Cyber threats against clouds have evolved rapidly. Traditional reactive cyber defense technologies are not effective and sufficient to protect federated clouds. This chapter introduces the novel federated cloud security architecture that includes proactive cloud defense technologies for secure and agile cloud development. The federated security architecture consists of a set of seamlessly integ...