Self-healing cyber defense improves web app security under attack
Evaluating autonomous self-healing against persistent cyber-attacks
Cryptography and Security
Summary
Computer systems face ongoing attacks that try to find weak spots and break in. The authors tested a software called SH4CS, which mimics the human immune system to fix problems on its own without waiting for help. Their tests showed that SH4CS can successfully defend web applications against repeated attacks. But there is still work to do to make it smart enough to handle all kinds of threats while keeping its behavior predictable.
What this means in practice
- •For cybersecurity teams: Protect web applications by automatically detecting and repairing repeated attack vulnerabilities in real time.
- •For industrial control operators: Implement self-healing software to maintain availability of critical systems during persistent cyber intrusions.
Authors
Bart Gijsen, Stefano Nieuwenhuizen, Lucien Yap, Georgi Spasov, Erwin de Haan, Mahira Ali, Shari Finner
Abstract
The need for autonomous cyber resilience (ACR) is strongly accelerating. The boost in cyber capabilities of advanced AI is speeding up the attacker-defender rat race to an unprecedented pace. As a result, the field of ACR must progress from early design and experimentation to hands-on evaluation and deployment. To illustrate what is needed for this transition, we put TNO's autonomous immune system-inspired Self-Healing for Cyber Security (SH4CS) software to the test. Our analytic and experimental evaluation results demonstrate that effective cyber resilience is achieved with SH4CS for (repeated) web application vulnerability exploits. Remaining challenges of SH4CS revolve around finding the right balance between predictable resilient behaviour, and adaptiveness to the large variety of cyber threats and applications-to-be-protected.