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Adaptive IP Mutation: A Proactive Approach for Defending against Worm Propagation

IP address mutation is a proactive defense method that is used to reduce the risk of network attacks, especially to deal with the worm propagation attacks. However, previous work did not give much consideration to the negative effects that IP address mutation could bring to network performance. To be specific, there is a trade-off between network performance and security, which implies that when a security mechanism is reinforced, network performance would be impaired and vice versa. Therefore, in order to achieve the optimal balance between performance and security, an optimal solution should be provided. In this paper, we propose an adaptive IP mutation defense method which is based on temporal-dimension, to dynamically control the mutation interval according to real-time measurable metrics, assurance and avoidance. This method leverages a genetic algorithm to achieve the optimization of performance-security trade-off. We then evaluate our method in a simulated computer cluster environment, including 1024 hosts, and demonstrate that our method can successfully find the optimal solution according to the experimental results. For example, it can reduce the worm propagation significantly, while maintaining the network performance in a predefined level.