Autonomous Intelligent Cyber-defense Agent: Introduction and Overview

This chapter introduces the concept of Autonomous Intelligent Cyber-defense Agents (AICAs), and briefly explains the importance of this field and the motivation for its emergence. AICA is a software agent that resides on a system, and is responsible for defending the system from cyber compromises and enabling the response and recovery of the system, usually autonomously. The autonomy of the agent is a necessity because of the growing scarcity of human cyber-experts who could defend systems, either remotely or onsite, and because sophisticated malware could degrade or spoof the communications of a system that uses a remote monitoring center. An AICA Reference Architecture has been proposed and defines five main functions: (1) sensing and world state identification, (2) planning and action selection, (3) collaboration and negotiation, (4) action execution and (5) learning and knowledge improvement. The chapter reviews the details of AICA's environment, functions and operations. As AICA is intended to make changes within its environment, there is a risk that an agent's action could harm a friendly computer. This risk must be balanced against the losses that could occur if the agent does not act. The chapter discusses means by which this risk can be managed and how AICA's design features could help build trust among its users.