A Moving Target Defense Technology Based on SCIT

Moving target defense technology is one of the revolutionary techniques that is “changing the rules of the game” in the field of network technology, according to recent propositions from the US Science and Technology Commission. Building upon a recently-developed approach called Self Cleansing Intrusion Tolerance (SCIT), this paper proposes a moving target defense system that is based on server switching and cleaning. A protected object is maneuvered to improve its safety by exploiting software diversity and thereby introducing randomness and unpredictability into the system. Experimental results show that the improved system increases the difficulty of attack and significantly reduces the likelihood of a system being invaded, thus serving to enhance system security.