Autonomous network cyber offence strategy through deep reinforcement learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Network defensive cyber operations (DCO) are inherently multi-domain, traversing different network segments and functional levels that encompass networking devices, protocols, services, applications and users. However, recent AI technologies threaten to complicate DCO as they can learn and adapt novel cyber-attack decision strategies to defeat countermeasures. Specifically, Reinforcement and Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL/DRL) are AI technologies for sequential decision-making in complex environments that have exceeded human master level performance in several domains through their ability to navigate the enormous state spaces of these environments. To investigate the effectiveness of AI-empowered autonomous cyber attacks, this work presents a preliminary study of DRL algorithms in training red AI agents in multi-domain computer networks. Employing a cyber network attack environment in the OpenAI Gym, the agents are trained to automatically establish and optimize their attack decision strategy. Different DRL algorithms are tested to evaluate the effectiveness against a selected set of network, service and application configurations, and to compare their stability, robustness and generalization characteristics. The results illustrate the potential of DRL-based cyber agents for researching new schemes to support cyber offence and defence operations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".