1 research outputs found
Three Decades of Deception Techniques in Active Cyber Defense -- Retrospect and Outlook
Deception techniques have been widely seen as a game changer in cyber
defense. In this paper, we review representative techniques in honeypots,
honeytokens, and moving target defense, spanning from the late 1980s to the
year 2021. Techniques from these three domains complement with each other and
may be leveraged to build a holistic deception based defense. However, to the
best of our knowledge, there has not been a work that provides a systematic
retrospect of these three domains all together and investigates their
integrated usage for orchestrated deceptions. Our paper aims to fill this gap.
By utilizing a tailored cyber kill chain model which can reflect the current
threat landscape and a four-layer deception stack, a two-dimensional taxonomy
is developed, based on which the deception techniques are classified. The
taxonomy literally answers which phases of a cyber attack campaign the
techniques can disrupt and which layers of the deception stack they belong to.
Cyber defenders may use the taxonomy as a reference to design an organized and
comprehensive deception plan, or to prioritize deception efforts for a budget
conscious solution. We also discuss two important points for achieving active
and resilient cyber defense, namely deception in depth and deception lifecycle,
where several notable proposals are illustrated. Finally, some outlooks on
future research directions are presented, including dynamic integration of
different deception techniques, quantified deception effects and deception
operation cost, hardware-supported deception techniques, as well as techniques
developed based on better understanding of the human element.Comment: 19 page