Evaluating the Security and Economic Effects of Moving Target Defense Techniques on the Cloud

Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a proactive security mechanism that changes the attack surface with the aim of confusing attackers. Cloud computing leverages MTD techniques to enhance the cloud security posture against cyber threats. While many MTD techniques have been applied to cloud computing, there has so far been no joint evaluation of the effectiveness of MTD techniques with respect to security and economic metrics. In this paper, we first introduce mathematical definitions for the combination of three MTD techniques: Shuffle, Diversity, and Redundancy. Then, we utilize four security metrics – namely, system risk, attack cost, return on attack, and reliability – to assess the effectiveness of the combined MTD techniques applied to large-scale cloud models. Second, we focus on a specific context based on a cloud model for e-health applications to evaluate the effectiveness of the MTD techniques using security and economic metrics. We introduce (1) a strategy to effectively deploy the Shuffle MTD technique using a virtual machine placement technique, and (2) two strategies to deploy the Diversity MTD technique through operating system diversification. As deploying the Diversity technique incurs costs, we formulate the optimal diversity assignment problem (O-DAP), and solve it as a binary linear programming model to obtain the assignment that maximizes the expected net benefit.