Model-based Performance Evaluation of a Moving Target Defense System

Moving target defense (MTD). emerging as a game-changer in the cyber defense area, has got a lot of attention and development recently. As a proactive defense technique, MTD dynamically changes system attributes in order to create more uncertainties of the system and has been proved to be effective against cyber attacks. Beyond this, there is still a lack of researches with respect to the quantitative analysis of the effect of MTD on system performance. This paper aims to quantitatively investigate how MTD affects system performance while bringing security. We develop Markov process-based models for two different MTD strategies and derive the formulas for metrics of interest. We carry out simulation experiments to validate our proposed models with Mininet. Furthermore, numerical analysis is conducted for comparing these two different strategies in terms of system performance. The numerical results also show how different parameters affect the evaluation metrics. Our models can help defenders configure the MTD system in the most suitable way.