Dynamic defenses in cyber security: Techniques, methods and challenges

Abstract Driven by the rapid development of the Internet of Things, cloud computing and other emerging technologies, the connotation of cyberspace is constantly expanding and becoming the fifth dimension of human activities. However, security problems in cyberspace are becoming serious, and traditional defense measures (e.g., firewall, intrusion detection systems and security audit) often fall into a passive situation of being prone to attacks and difficult to take effect when responding to new types of network attacks with a higher and higher degree of coordination and intelligence. By constructing and implementing the diverse strategy of dynamic transformation, the configuration characteristics of systems are constantly changing, and the probability of vulnerability exposure is increasing. Therefore, the difficulty and cost of attack are increasing, which provides new ideas for reversing the asymmetric situation of defense and attack in cyberspace. Nonetheless, few related works systematically introduce dynamic defense mechanisms for cyber security. The related concepts and development strategies of dynamic defense are rarely analyzed and summarized. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive and concrete survey of recent research efforts on dynamic defense in cyber security. Specifically, we firstly introduce basic concepts and define dynamic defense in cyber security. Next, we review the architectures, enabling techniques and methods for moving target defense and mimic defense. This is followed by taxonomically summarizing the implementation and evaluation of dynamic defense. Finally, we discuss some open challenges and opportunities on dynamic defense in cyber security.