Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Adaptive Cyber Defense
This is an incremental effort to bridge gaps between AI and cyber researchers for improving national and global security through adaptive cyber defense.
The workshop addressed the problem of insufficient human experts for reliable cyber defense by exploring AI and ML applications to develop adaptive, semi-autonomous defenses that can learn and respond to threats, with proceedings including 10 technical articles.
The 1st International Workshop on Adaptive Cyber Defense was held as part of the 2021 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This workshop was organized to share research that explores unique applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) as foundational capabilities for the pursuit of adaptive cyber defense. The cyber domain cannot currently be reliably and effectively defended without extensive reliance on human experts. Skilled cyber defenders are in short supply and often cannot respond fast enough to cyber threats. Building on recent advances in AI and ML the Cyber defense research community has been motivated to develop new dynamic and sustainable defenses through the adoption of AI and ML techniques to both cyber and non-cyber settings. Bridging critical gaps between AI and Cyber researchers and practitioners can accelerate efforts to create semi-autonomous cyber defenses that can learn to recognize and respond to cyber attacks or discover and mitigate weaknesses in cooperation with other cyber operation systems and human experts. Furthermore, these defenses are expected to be adaptive and able to evolve over time to thwart changes in attacker behavior, changes in the system health and readiness, and natural shifts in user behavior over time. The Workshop (held on August 19th and 20th 2021 in Montreal-themed virtual reality) was comprised of technical presentations and a panel discussion focused on open problems and potential research solutions. Workshop submissions were peer reviewed by a panel of domain experts with a proceedings consisting of 10 technical articles exploring challenging problems of critical importance to national and global security. Participation in this workshop offered new opportunities to stimulate research and innovation in the emerging domain of adaptive and autonomous cyber defense.