Research Team Status

• Names of researchers and position 
  (e.g. Research Scientist, PostDoc, Student (Undergrad/Masters/PhD))
  • Xenofon Koutsoukos – PI
  • Sandeep Neema – co-PI
  • Gabor Karsai – co-PI
  • Ankita Samaddar- Postdoctoral Scholar
  • Nicholas Potteiger – PhD student
  • Hunter Bergstrom – MS student
     
• Any new collaborations with other universities/researchers?
  • Collaboration with the DARPA CASTLE project performed by Vanderbilt and University of Virginia which aims at developing a realistic emulation testbed for training autonomous cyber agents.

Project Goals

• What is the current project goal?
  • Develop an approach for autonomous cyber defense using behavior trees with learning-enabled components, which we refer to as Evolving Behavior Trees (EBTs), incorporating capabilities for adapting to various cyber-attacks and deploying security mechanisms. 
  • Develop a software architecture for evaluating EBT-based agents in computer network defense scenarios based in the CybORG simulation environment.
     
• How does the current goal factor into the long-term goal of the project?
  • The current goal addresses directly the development of the agent architecture including the required learning method and demonstration and evaluation which are the main tasks of the year 1 base period. 

Accomplishments

• Address whether project milestones were met. If milestones were not met, explain why, and what are the next steps.
  • Project milestones are with respect to both the agent architecture and the demonstration/evaluation.
     
• What is the contribution to foundational cybersecurity research? Was there something discovered or confirmed?
  • Our preliminary results demonstrate that the neurosymbolic agent is robust to adaptive cyber-attacks and provides high-level explanations for interpreting its decisions and actions.  
     
• Impact of research
  • Internal to the university (coursework/curriculum)
  • External to the university (transition to industry/government (local/federal); patents, start-ups, software, etc.)
  • Any acknowledgements, awards, or references in media?

Publications and presentations

• Add publication reference in the publications section below. An authors copy or final should be added in the report file(s) section. This is for NSA's review only.
• Optionally, upload technical presentation slides that may go into greater detail. For NSA's review only.

1. Hunter Bergstrom, Nicholas Potteiger, and Xenofon Koutsoukos. WiP: Autonomous Cyber-Defense using Evolving Behavior Trees. Symposium on the Science of Security (HotSoS 2024). Submitted.
2. Nicholas Potteiger and Xenofon Koutsoukos. “Safeguarding Autonomous UAV Navigation: Agent Design using Evolving Behavior Trees”. 2024 IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon). Accepted for publication.