ADAPTIVE SECURITY AND TRUST

In this paper we discuss ongoing work in an ambitious DARPA funded effort to develop new ways of achieving cyber security. The broad approach taken by the project is for the network to be self-aware and to self-adapt in order to dodge attacks. In critical systems, it is not always the best or practical thing to do to shut down the network under attack. The paper describes the trust modeling system that attempts to maintain a model of trust for networked resources using a combination of two basic ideas: Conditional trust (based on conditional preference (CP-Nets) and the principle of maximum entropy (PME). We describe Monte-Carlo simulations of using adaptive security based on our trust model. The results of the simulations show the trade-off, under ideal conditions, between additional resource provisioning and attack mitigation.