Iona College researcher using defensive forecasting to stop hackers
If you’re in charge of stopping hackers and malware from getting into your network, you might consider the job anything but a game.
But security researchers in academia for years have been applying game theory to try to solve network security challenges.
One of the latest to do so is Iona College visting professor and information technologist Heechang Shin, who writes about his work in a paper called Identifying Network Intrusion with Defensive Forecasting in a new edition of the International Journal of Business Continuity and Risk Management.
Shin argues that his real-time method of network defense can be more effective than even next-generation firewalls and other such security tools. According to the publisher, the defensive forecasting tool plays a game of reality vs. forecast, and “wins” the game by blocking an intrusion when reality matches the forecast. The tool continuously learns attack patterns over time to nip in the bud threats such as denial-of-service attacks, insider attacks by those with system root privileges and syn floods, according to Shin.
Game theoretics applied to network security is such a hot research topic that some researchers (such as those from the University of Memphis) have begun doing surveys of what’s been discovered to date.
