Removing Target Defense for Internet-Controlled Systems

Internet-controlled systems provide a variety of applications, from healthcare to military and industrial applications. One of the best advantages of these systems is remotely controlling from an unlimited distance via the Internet. Another advantage is leveraging Internet Protocol (IP) with many off-the-shelf applications. Remote cyber-attacks on such systems can cause loss of life, threaten public safety/national security, or impact environmental disasters. IP address hopping, rotating IP addresses, is one of the Moving Target Defense (MTD) solutions that could prevent remote cyber-attacks during their reconnaissance step. This paper presents a novel Removing Target Defense (RTD) method that can remove any accessible IP address from the systems instead of dynamically changing those addresses. RTD is a secure and reliable network protocol for data communications between multiple devices over the Internet without having any assigned IP addresses on those devices. RTD uses multiple ideas from different fields such as steganography, covert channels, cryptography, and network protocols to eliminate the attack surface.