ABOUT THE PROJECT:
Starting from the premise that cyber attacks have quantifiable objectives, our long-term goal is to develop computational tools that quickly recover the objective associated with any given attack by observing its effects. Knowledge of this objective is critical to threat assessment. It allows us to understand the scope of an attack, to predict how the attack will proceed, and to respond in a systematic and targeted way. Our approach to recovering this objective is based on a new method for solving the problem of "inverse optimal control." Much of our recent work has focused on establishing the theoretical foundations for this method of solution. In this project we are exploring its application to threat assessment.