Publications

Foundations for cyber zone defense

Mitchell, Robert; Sery, Paul G.; Klitsner, Tom K.

We will introduce a new framework called cyber zone defense (CZD) that treats malware like a black box: a process we can study solely based on its internal and external communication. We can reduce the impact of malware, without regard to its functionality or even existence, by limiting only these connections. In this paper, we propose two metrics for measuring CZD effectiveness and an illustrative simulation and a closed form mathematical model that predicts these statistics. The simulation is intuitive; it allows the analyst to provision arbitrary configurations and see how changes in topology affect the efficacy of the CZD. The model provides a mathematical verification for CZD and matches the results of the simulation well. These artifacts test the feasibility of CZD while deferring implementation details.