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DARPA Information Assurance Program Dynamic Defense
Experiment Summary
Dorene L. Kewley and Julie F. Bouchard
Abstract—Several types of experiments are being conducted by the De-
fense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Assur-
ance (IA) Program in DARPA’s IA Lab. This research program is driven
by concepts of strategic cyberdefense. Each experiment involves a carefully
formulated hypothesis that is intended to be either supported or refuted by
the experimental testing. In many cases, “red team” attackers participate
in all phases of the experiment and contribute to generating the data re-
quired to test the hypothesis. The red team is usually structured to model
a well-resourced adversary, such as a foreign, national intelligence agency.
The particular experiment described here explored one aspect of the IA
program’s grand hypothesis of dynamic defense: “Dynamic modification of
defensive structure improves system assurance.” This experiment concen-
trated on the assertion that autonomic response mechanisms can improve
overall system assurance by thwarting an attack while it is underway. In
most cases, each attack in this experiment was run first with only “prevent
and detect” mechanisms enabled, then repeated with “prevent, detect, and
respond mechanisms” enabled. The key result of this experiment is that the
hypothesis was supported.
Index Terms—Command and control systems, computer network secu-
rity.
I. INTRODUCTION
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Infor-
mation Assurance (IA) Program is conducting leading-edge research
and development in strategic cyberdefense, specifically those areas the
commercial world is not yet likely exploring. Information assurance
may be defined as a guarantee that information presented by a system
is accurate, properly represented, and available [1]. In short, the goal
of information assurance is to develop an information system “that can
be depended upon to behave as it is expected to [2].” A well-resourced
adversary could pose a significant threat to our nation by using cyber
means to disrupt critical information infrastructure activities, such as
electric power distribution, financial clearinghouse operations, and air
transportation. Therefore, the work of protecting national assets that de-
pend on a common network infrastructure is more important and diffi-
cult now than it has ever been [3]. The IA program has been challenged
to conduct research into defending our nation’s cyberassets and explore
“dark spaces” of cyberdefense, that is, explore security problem areas
in which the commercial world does not yet offer solutions. One of the
dark spaces being examined is dynamic defense.
In the kinetic world, it is generally agreed that it is effective to modify
your defensive posture in an attempt to hinder the adversary’s intelli-
gence gathering process [4]. It has been suggested that dynamic de-
fense theory can also be effectively applied to defending cyberassets.
It follows that one of the IA program’s grand hypotheses that “dynamic
modification of defensive structure improves system assurance.”
Response to adversary action is an area that has intrigued the net-
work security world for quite some time [5]. An experiment conducted
in the Fall of 1999 explored at a fundamental level whether a cyber ad-
versary’s attack could successfully be thwarted by a defender’s ability
Manuscript received September 1, 2000; revised April 5, 2001.
D. L. Kewley is with BBN Technologies, Arlington, VA 22209 (e-mail:
dkewley@bbn.com).
J. F. Bouchard was with Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, NM 87185.
She is now with SRI International, Albuquerque, NM 87185. (e-mail:
julie.bouchard@sri.com).
Publisher Item Identifier S 1083-4427(01)05292-4.
1083–4427/01$10.00 © 2001 IEEE