Publications

Refining the foundations for cyber zone defense

Mitchell, Robert; Sery, Paul

Since our last paper, cyber attacks have shown no evidence of declining in frequency or sophistication. We claim that applying isolation zones is an effective way to defend cyber systems; our team proposes a simulation and mathematical model that provide numerical data that supports this claim. This paper extends our earlier cyber zone defense (CZD) framework in two critical ways. First, we relax our assumption that zones completely isolate nodes and consider interzone boundaries to be porous. Second, we investigate methods to estimate one of the legacy parameters inherited from our earlier work and the new porosity parameter. The extended simulation and model more closely approximate real world cyber systems and have lower residuals than our previous investigation.