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Abstract

Many defensive measures in cyber security are still dominated by heuristics, catalogs of standard procedures, and best practices. Considering the case of data backup strategies, we aim towards mathematically modeling the underlying threat models and decision problems. By formulating backup strategies in the language of stochastic processes, we can translate the challenge of finding optimal defenses into a reinforcement learning problem. This enables us to train autonomous agents that learn to optimally support planning of defense processes. In particular, we tackle the problem of finding an optimal backup scheme in the following adversarial setting: Given \(k\) backup devices, the goal is to defend against an attacker who can infect data at one time but chooses to destroy or encrypt it at a later time, potentially also corrupting multiple backups made in between. In this setting, the usual round-robin scheme, which always replaces the oldest backup, is no longer optimal with respect to avoidable exposure. Thus, to find a defense strategy, we model the problem as a hybrid discrete-continuous action space Markov decision process and subsequently solve it using deep deterministic policy gradients. We show that the proposed algorithm can find storage device update schemes which match or exceed existing schemes with respect to various exposure metrics.

Details

1009240
Business indexing term
Title
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Backup Strategies against Adversaries
Publication title
arXiv.org; Ithaca
Publication year
2021
Publication date
Feb 12, 2021
Section
Computer Science; Mathematics
Publisher
Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
Source
arXiv.org
Place of publication
Ithaca
Country of publication
United States
University/institution
Cornell University Library arXiv.org
e-ISSN
2331-8422
Source type
Working Paper
Language of publication
English
Document type
Working Paper
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2021-02-15
Milestone dates
2021-02-12 (Submission v1)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
15 Feb 2021
ProQuest document ID
2489445568
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/working-papers/deep-reinforcement-learning-backup-strategies/docview/2489445568/se-2?accountid=208611
Full text outside of ProQuest
Copyright
© 2021. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2024-06-26
Database
ProQuest One Academic