Firewall Regulatory Networks for Autonomous Cyber Defense

Abstract: In this paper, we present the principles of designing new self-organising and autonomous management protocol to govern the dynamics of bio-inspired decentralized firewall architecture based on Biological Regularity Networks. The new architecture called Firewall Regulatory Networks (FRN) exhibits the following features (1) automatic rule policy configuration with provable utility-risk appetite guarantee, (2) resilient response for changing risks or new service requirements, and (3) globally optimized access control policy reconciliation. We present the FRN protocol and formalize the constraints to synthesize the undetermined components in the protocol to produce interactions that can achieve these objectives. We illustrate the feasibility of the FRN architecture in multiple case studies.