Cyber of the Fittest: Researchers Develop First Cyber Agility Framework to Measure Attacks

For more than a year, GozNym, a gang of five Russian cybercriminals, stole login credentials and emptied bank accounts from unaware Americans. To detect and quickly respond to escalating cyber-attacks like these, researchers at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) have developed the first framework to score the agility of cyber attackers and defenders. The cyber agility project was funded by the Army Research Office.

"Cyber agility isn't just about patching a security hole, it's about understanding what happens over time. Sometimes when you protect one vulnerability, you expose yourself to 10 others," said computer science alumnus Jose Mireles '17, who now works for the U.S. Department of Defense and co-developed this first known framework as part of his UTSA master's thesis. "In car crashes, we understand how to test for safety using the rules of physics. It is much harder to quantify cybersecurity because scientists have yet to figure out what are the rules of cybersecurity. Having formal metrics and measurement to understand the attacks that occur will benefit a wide range of cyber professionals."

To develop a quantifiable framework, Mireles collaborated with fellow UTSA student Eric Ficke, researchers at Virginia Tech, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory (CCDC ARL). The project was conducted under the supervision of UTSA Professor Shouhuai Xu, who serves as the director of the UTSA Laboratory for Cybersecurity Dynamics.

Together, they used a honeypot-a computer system that lures real cyber-attacks-to attract and analyze malicious traffic according to time and effectiveness. As both the attackers and the defenders created new techniques, the researchers were able to better understand how a series of engagements transformed into an adaptive, responsive and agile pattern or what they called an evolution generation.

The framework proposed by the researchers will help government and industry organizations visualize how well they out-maneuver attacks. This groundbreaking work will be published in an upcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, a top cybersecurity journal. 

"The cyber agility framework is the first of its kind and allows cyber defenders to test out numerous and varied responses to an attack," said Xu. "This is an outstanding piece of work as it will shape the investigation and practice of cyber agility for the many years to come."

"The DoD and US Army recognize that the Cyber domain is as important a battlefront as Ground, Air, and Sea," said Purush Iyer, Ph.D. division chief, network sciences at Army Research Office, an element of CCDC ARL. "Being able to predict what the adversaries will likely do provides opportunities to protect and to launch countermeasures."

Mireles added, "A picture or graph, in this case, is really worth more than 1,000 words. Using our framework, security professionals will recognize if they're getting beaten or doing a good job against an attacker."

UTSA is home to the nation's top cybersecurity program, an interdisciplinary approach that spans three colleges: the College of Business, College of Engineering and College of Sciences. Research centers and outreach programs provide UTSA students and faculty with additional opportunities to explore the various facets of this high demand and ever-changing field.

The Department of Computer Science, housed in the UTSA College of Sciences, offers bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree programs that support more than 1,360 undergraduate students and 68 graduate students. Its major research units include the UTSA Institute for Cyber Security, which operates the FlexCloud and FlexFarm laboratories dedicated to both basic and applied cybersecurity research, and the UTSA Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS), which focuses on the cybersecurity maturity of cities and communities while conducting national cyber defense competitions for high school and college students.

San Antonio is home to one of the largest concentrations of cybersecurity experts and industry leaders outside Washington, D.C., which uniquely positions the city and UTSA to lead the nation in cybersecurity research and workforce development.