Evaluating Moving Target Defenses against Realistic Attack Scenarios

Defenders are continuously seeking new tools for better security, including proactive defenses like Moving Target Defense (MTD). MTD continuously changes the attack surface, but there's little research on combining different MTD techniques, and often attack scenarios considered are simple and unrealistic. This paper proposes to evaluate the combined effects of MTD techniques against practical and realistic attack scenarios through a simulation framework. Our results indicate that adopting MTD techniques in general improves the security of systems, but combinations can have varying levels of defense depending on the attack scenarios. Hence, our proposed approach provides a more realistic evaluation of MTD techniques and their combinations taking into account practical attack scenarios, which can aid decision-makers to make better-informed decisions.