A System for Interactive Examination of Learned Security Policies
This work addresses the need for interpretability in security policy learning for IT professionals, though it is incremental as it builds on existing reinforcement learning methods.
The authors tackled the problem of understanding learned security policies by developing an interactive system that allows users to debug and inspect these policies in controlled environments, such as network intrusion scenarios, enabling insights into policy structure and behavior in edge cases.
We present a system for interactive examination of learned security policies. It allows a user to traverse episodes of Markov decision processes in a controlled manner and to track the actions triggered by security policies. Similar to a software debugger, a user can continue or or halt an episode at any time step and inspect parameters and probability distributions of interest. The system enables insight into the structure of a given policy and in the behavior of a policy in edge cases. We demonstrate the system with a network intrusion use case. We examine the evolution of an IT infrastructure's state and the actions prescribed by security policies while an attack occurs. The policies for the demonstration have been obtained through a reinforcement learning approach that includes a simulation system where policies are incrementally learned and an emulation system that produces statistics that drive the simulation runs.