Evolution of network enumeration strategies in emulated computer networks

Sean Harris, Eric Michalak, Kevin Schoonover, Adam Gausmann, Hannah Reinbolt, Joshua Herman, Daniel Tauritz, Chris Rawlings, Aaron Scott Pope
2018 Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion on - GECCO '18  
Successful attacks on computer networks today do not often owe their victory to directly overcoming strong security measures set up by the defender. Rather, most attacks succeed because the number of possible vulnerabilities are too large for humans to fully protect without making a mistake. Regardless of the security elsewhere, a skilled attacker can exploit a single vulnerability in a defensive system and negate the benefits of those security measures. This paper presents an evolutionary
more » ... work for evolving attacker agents in a real, emulated network environment using genetic programming, as a foundation for coevolutionary systems which can automatically discover and mitigate network security flaws. We examine network enumeration, an initial network reconnaissance step, through our framework and present results demonstrating its success, indicating a broader applicability to further cyber-security tasks.
doi:10.1145/3205651.3208270 dblp:conf/gecco/HarrisMSGRHTRP18 fatcat:ywkpy6efhbdvtixnpntccfnete