Paul Théron

Alexander Kott, Paul Theron

Today's cyber defense tools are mostly watchers. They are not active doers. To be sure, watching too is a demanding affair. These tools monitor the traffic and events; they detect malicious signatures, patterns and anomalies; they might classify and characterize what they observe; they issue alerts, and they might even learn while doing all this. But they don't act. They do little to plan and execute responses to attacks, and they don't plan and execute recovery activities. Response and recovery - core elements of cyber resilience are left to the human cyber analysts, incident responders and system administrators. We believe things should change. Cyber defense tools should not be merely watchers. They need to become doers - active fighters in maintaining a system's resilience against cyber threats. This means that their capabilities should include a significant degree of autonomy and intelligence for the purposes of rapid response to a compromise - either incipient or already successful - and rapid recovery that aids the resilience of the overall system. Often, the response and recovery efforts need to be undertaken in absence of any human involvement, and with an intelligent consideration of risks and ramifications of such efforts. Recently an international team published a report that proposes a vision of an autonomous intelligent cyber defense agent (AICA) and offers a high-level reference architecture of such an agent. In this paper we explore this vision.

Paul Théron, Alexander Kott

In the coming years, the future of military combat will include, on one hand, artificial intelligence-optimized complex command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and networks and, on the other hand, autonomous intelligent Things fighting autonomous intelligent Things at a fast pace. Under this perspective, enemy forces will seek to disable or disturb our autonomous Things and our complex infrastructures and systems. Autonomy, scale and complexity in our defense systems will trigger new cyber-attack strategies, and autonomous intelligent malware (AIM) will be part of the picture. Should these cyber-attacks succeed while human operators remain unaware or unable to react fast enough due to the speed, scale or complexity of the mission, systems or attacks, missions would fail, our networks and C4ISR would be heavily disrupted, and command and control would be disabled. New cyber-defense doctrines and technologies are therefore required. Autonomous cyber defense (ACyD) is a new field of research and technology driven by the defense sector in anticipation of such threats to future military infrastructures, systems and operations. It will be implemented via swarms of autonomous intelligent cyber-defense agents (AICAs) that will fight AIM within our networks and systems. This paper presents this cyber-defense technology of the future, the current state of the art in this field and its main challenges. First, we review the rationale of the ACyD concept and its associated AICA technology. Then, we present the current research results from NATO's IST-152 Research Task Group on the AICA Reference Architecture. We then develop the 12 main technological challenges that must be resolved in the coming years, besides ethical and political issues.

Paul Theron, Alexander Kott, Martin Drašar et al.

Within the future Global Information Grid, complex massively interconnected systems, isolated defense vehicles, sensors and effectors, and infrastructures and systems demanding extremely low failure rates, to which human security operators cannot have an easy access and cannot deliver fast enough reactions to cyber-attacks, need an active, autonomous and intelligent cyber defense. Multi Agent Systems for Cyber Defense may provide an answer to this requirement. This paper presents the concept and architecture of an Autonomous Intelligent Cyber defense Agent (AICA). First, we describe the rationale of the AICA concept. Secondly, we explain the methodology and purpose that drive the definition of the AICA Reference Architecture (AICARA) by NATO's IST-152 Research and Technology Group. Thirdly, we review some of the main features and challenges of Multi Autonomous Intelligent Cyber defense Agent (MAICA). Fourthly, we depict the initially assumed AICA Reference Architecture. Then we present one of our preliminary research issues, assumptions and ideas. Finally, we present the future lines of research that will help develop and test the AICA / MAICA concept.

Alexander Kott, Ryan Thomas, Martin Drašar et al.

This report summarizes the discussions and findings of the Workshop on Intelligent Autonomous Agents for Cyber Defence and Resilience organized by the NATO research group IST-152-RTG. The workshop was held in Prague, Czech Republic, on 18-20 October 2017. There is a growing recognition that future cyber defense should involve extensive use of partially autonomous agents that actively patrol the friendly network, and detect and react to hostile activities rapidly (far faster than human reaction time), before the hostile malware is able to inflict major damage, evade friendly agents, or destroy friendly agents. This requires cyber-defense agents with a significant degree of intelligence, autonomy, self-learning, and adaptability. The report focuses on the following questions: In what computing and tactical environments would such an agent operate? What data would be available for the agent to observe or ingest? What actions would the agent be able to take? How would such an agent plan a complex course of actions? Would the agent learn from its experiences, and how? How would the agent collaborate with humans? How can we ensure that the agent will not take undesirable destructive actions? Is it possible to help envision such an agent with a simple example?