Chapter 2 Towards Intelligent Cyber Deception Systems Fabio De Gaspari, Sushil Jajodia, Luigi V. Mancini, and Giulio Pagnotta Abstract The increasingly sophisticated nature of cyberattacks reduces the effec- tiveness of expert human intervention due to their slow response times. Conse- quently, interest in automated agents that can make intelligent decisions and plan countermeasures is rapidly growing. In this chapter, we discuss intelligent cyber deception systems. Such systems can dynamically plan the deception strategy and use several actuators to effectively implement the cyber deception measures. We also present a prototype of a framework designed to simplify the development of cyber deception tools to be integrated with such intelligent agents. 2.1 Introduction The knowledge of attackers and the sophistication of cyberattacks are constantly increasing, as well as the complexity of the cyber domain. The result of this process is that expert human intervention, even if available, is not always fast enough to deal with the speed of cyberthreats. As a consequence, cyber deception strategies aimed at hindering attackers’ progress and cyber defense agents that can make autonomous decisions are receiving an increasing amount of attention [9, 17]. An important part of cyber deception is active defense [15, 16]. Differently from classical, reactive systems such as firewalls, IPS, and IDS, active defense tools aim to hinder attackers’ progress in a proactive manner, rather than responding if and when an attack is detected. One of the most well-known examples of active The original version of this chapter was revised: Chapter authors have been added. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02110-8_12 F. De Gaspari · L. V. Mancini · G. Pagnotta Sapienza University of Rome, Roma, RM, Italy S. Jajodia () George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA e-mail: jajodia@gmu.edu © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 E. Al-Shaer et al. (eds.), Autonomous Cyber Deception, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02110-8_2 21