High level information fusion for tracking and projection of multistage cyber attacks

The use of computer networks has become a necessity for government, industry, and personal businesses. Protection and defense against cyber attacks on computer networks, however, are becoming inadequate as attackers become more sophisticated and as the networks and systems become more complex. Drawing analogies from other application domains, this paper introduces information fusion to provide situation awareness and threat prediction from massive volumes of sensed data. An in-depth discussion is provided to define fusion tasks for cyber defense. A novel cyber fusion system is proposed to address specifically the tracking and projection of multistage attacks. Critical assessments of the developed attack tracking and threat projection sub-components are provided with simulation results. This pioneering work elaborates the benefits, limitations, and future challenges of high level information fusion for cyber security.