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Abstract
Cyber attacks are increasing in volume, frequency, and complexity. In
response, the security community is looking toward fully automating cyber
defense systems using machine learning. However, so far the resultant effects
on the coevolutionary dynamics of attackers and defenders have not been
examined. In this whitepaper, we hypothesise that increased automation on both
sides will accelerate the coevolutionary cycle, thus begging the question of
whether there are any resultant fixed points, and how they are characterised.
Working within the threat model of Locked Shields, Europe's largest
cyberdefense exercise, we study blackbox adversarial attacks on network
classifiers. Given already existing attack capabilities, we question the
utility of optimal evasion attack frameworks based on minimal evasion
distances. Instead, we suggest a novel reinforcement learning setting that can
be used to efficiently generate arbitrary adversarial perturbations. We then
argue that attacker-defender fixed points are themselves general-sum games with
complex phase transitions, and introduce a temporally extended multi-agent
reinforcement learning framework in which the resultant dynamics can be
studied. We hypothesise that one plausible fixed point of AI-NIDS may be a
scenario where the defense strategy relies heavily on whitelisted feature flow
subspaces. Finally, we demonstrate that a continual learning approach is
required to study attacker-defender dynamics in temporally extended general-sum
games.