Poster: Effectiveness of Moving Target Defense Techniques to Disrupt Attacks in the Cloud Salman Manzoor Lancaster University United Kingdom s.manzoor1@lancaster.ac.uk Antonios Gouglidis Lancaster University United Kingdom a.gouglidis@lancaster.ac.uk Matthew Bradbury Lancaster University United Kingdom m.s.bradbury@lancaster.ac.uk Neeraj Suri Lancaster University United Kingdom neeraj.suri@lancaster.ac.uk ABSTRACT Moving Target Defense (MTD) can eliminate the asymmetric advan- tage that attackers have in terms of time to explore a static system by changing a system’s configuration dynamically to reduce the efficacy of reconnaissance and increase uncertainty and complexity for attackers. To this extent, a variety of MTDs have been proposed for specific aspects of a system. However, deploying MTDs at differ- ent layers/components of the Cloud and assessing their effects on the overall security gains for the entire system is still challenging since the Cloud is a complex system entailing physical and virtual resources, and there exists a multitude of attack surfaces that an attacker can target. Thus, we explore the combination of MTDs, and their deployment at different components (belonging to various operational layers) to maximize the security gains offered by the MTDs. We also propose a quantification mechanism to evaluate the effectiveness of the MTDs against the attacks in the Cloud. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy →Information flow control; Distributed systems security. ACM Reference Format: Salman Manzoor, Antonios Gouglidis, Matthew Bradbury, and Neeraj Suri. 2022. Poster: Effectiveness of Moving Target Defense Techniques to Disrupt Attacks in the Cloud. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’22), November 7–11, 2022, Los Angeles, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10. 1145/3548606.3563514 1 INTRODUCTION Current IT systems operate in a relatively static configuration which gives attackers the advantage of time, as attackers can plan, per- form reconnaissance, and execute attacks without time constraints. Conventional security measures rely on patching individual vul- nerabilities, which can be cumbersome, time-consuming, and risk introducing configuration errors in the system. Moreover, it is dif- ficult (and likely impossible) for system defenders to eliminate all vulnerabilities in a system; this provides the attackers a window of opportunity to compromise the system. Consequently, Moving Target Defense (MTD) [8] techniques are advocated as a proactive approach to improve a system’s security. The basic premise behind Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CCS ’22, November 7–11, 2022, Los Angeles, CA, USA © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9450-5/22/11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3548606.3563514 MTD is that introducing increased uncertainty and complexity for the attackers reduces the likelihood of them successfully exploiting the system. For example, a dynamic run-time environment could change the execution environment presented to the application [2], while MTD techniques focusing on the network layer dynamically modifies the network characteristics (e.g., IP/MAC addresses) [4] to change the attack surfaces presented to the adversary. The previously mentioned MTDs are typically applied to indi- vidual aspects of a system (IP addresses, OS replicas, etc.). Their effectiveness is measured through their capability to mitigate at- tacks targeting these components. However, the application of the MTDs considering a holistic view of the Cloud is limited [1] due t