A Game Theoretic Approach for Cloud Computing Security Assessment Using Moving Target Defense Mechanisms

Abstract

Nowadays, the security of the Internet is always dressing severe challenges. To achieve network system’s security with the complexity and the diversity of attack types is too difficult and costly. However, to make the network systems more resistant to attacks, Moving Target Defense (MTD) has been introduced to maximize the complexity and the uncertainty of various attacks. Indeed, these proactive defense techniques have been deployed as a game changer to prevent or delay attacks and limit their opportunity windows. This paper provides an important branch of MTD mechanisms named IP address hopping mechanism using detection systems for attack mitigation in the cloud environment. We have used a game theory approach to model the attack-defense interaction and analyze the effect of MTD on the payoff of both the attacker and the defender. Consequently, we have used Matlab simulator to validate the proposed model. Our approach demonstrated its feasibility in terms of attack mitigation in the cloud and proved the efficiency of IP address hopping mechanism to reduce the attacker’s opportunity window.