Full Service Hopping for Proactive Cyber-Defense

Inspired by deceptive and evasive countermeasures for military environment, a proactive cyber defense tactic of full service hopping is proposed which changes all the service information pseudo-randomly, including service port, network address, service slot, cryptographic algorithm and even the service protocol. A novel concept of dynamic honey pot is presented which mimics the ancient battle diagrams to bewilder the adversary by changing the role of every hopping station pseudo-randomly. Thereafter a full service hopping framework and synchronization scheme of Spokesman are introduced. Then a distributed prototype is carried out through mobile Java agent. Our experimental works demonstrate that full hopping tactic has better performance for active cyber-defense. Moreover, the overheads of handover and synchronization during service hopping are also discussed in this paper.