Intelligent Decision Support for Cybersecurity Incident Response Teams: Autonomic Architecture and Mitigation Search

Abstract

Critical infrastructures must be able to mitigate, at runtime, suspected ongoing cyberattacks that have eluded preventive security measures. To tackle this issue, we first propose an autonomic computing architecture for a Cyber-Security Incident Response Team Intelligent Decision Support System (CSIRT-IDSS) with a precise set of technologies for each of its components. We then zoom in on the component responsible for proposing to the CSIRT, automatically ranked sets of runtime actions to mitigate suspected ongoing cyber-attacks. We formalize its task as a Constraint Optimization Problem (COP). We then propose to implement it by a Constraint Object-Oriented Logic Program (COOLP) deployed as a containerized web service through the integration of three orthogonal extensions of Logic Programming (LP): Web Service Oriented LP (WSOLP), Constraint LP (CLP) and Object-Oriented LP (OOLP). This integration supports seamlessly reusing platform and task independent cybersecurity ontological knowledge to dynamically build a mitigation action search COP that is customized to an input suspected cyberattack action set. This customization then allows the COP, to be solved by a generic CLP engine efficiently enough to propose mitigation actions to the CSIRT team while they can still be effective. To validate this approach, we implemented a prototype called CARMAS (Cyber Attack Runtime Mitigation Action Search) and ran scalability tests on simulated attacks with various COP construction strategies.