Alexander Kott

Chief Scientist, Army Research Laboratory

Bonware to the Rescue: the Future Autonomous Cyber Defense Agents (pptx, video)

I will begin my talk my pointing out that in a number of important domains, especially mobile, such as military but also industrial, conventional cyber defense paradigms are increasingly inadequate, and one solution might involve host based autonomous cyber defense agents. For a number of reasons machine learning is a key to creation and continuing adaptation of such an agent.  I will discuss what this agent might look like and what distinct functional features and advantages it might exhibit. I will also describe a tentative vision of how such agent might be architected and where Machine Learning fits into the architecture. I will outline requirements for the learning process, and possible approaches to how the agent can learn to actively parry the actions of the malware; and what apparent limitations of today’s ML must be overcome in order to address such requirements.