A Model for Analyzing the Effectiveness of Moving Target Defense

Moving target defense(MTD) is a typical proactive cyber defense technology, which not only increases the difficulty of the attacker, but also reduces the damage caused by successful attacks. A number of studies have assessed the defensive effectiveness of MTD, but only focus on increasing the difficulty of attacks. No studies have been conducted to assess the impact of successful attacks on the network. In this paper, we propose a probability model that evaluates the impact of MTD against subsequent stages of complete attack process. The model quantify the probability distribution of the number of compromised hosts. The results of simulation show that MTD can reduce the number of compromised hosts, and attackers cannot control all hosts.