Abstract
The AICA International Working Group (IWG) spent 2021 collaboratively developing an initial prototype implementation of the AICA reference architecture, AICAproto21. This prototype was built using open-source software components in a containerized manner to allow for the quickest time-to-completion with maximum flexibility for future capabilities. This prototype was a fully self-contained demonstration of the ability of the agent to respond to an indicated attack with a defensive action, though the scope of scenarios was constrained due to the primary focus on the construction of the framework itself. Future work would include incorporation of computational intelligence (i.e., knowledge representation and automated reasoning components) and additional scenarios. The authors found that the chosen approach did lead to a very easy-to-scale solution that is likely to work in a cross-platform manner. Complicating factors encountered include the difficulty in constructing the framework to operate with various external systems in a generalizable way, and the likely host-system impact of needing to run multiple containers simultaneously to achieve desired functionality, especially when host systems could be low-power “things” such as drones, weapons platforms, et cetera. A critical question to answer as work on AICAproto21 and related experimentation continues is whether the effort required to build a more “ground-up” monolithic application is justified by the potential savings in resource consumption and optimization for the specified purpose.
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The work presented in this chapter was partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science under DOE contract number DE-AC02-06CH11357. The submitted manuscript has been created by UChicago Argonne, LLC, operator of Argonne National Laboratory. Argonne, a DOE Office of Science laboratory, is operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. The U.S. Government retains for itself, and others acting on its behalf, a paid-up nonexclusive, irrevocable worldwide license in said article to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies to the public, and perform publicly and display publicly, by or on behalf of the Government.
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Blakely, B., Horsthemke, W., Evans, N., Harkness, D. (2023). Case Study A: A Prototype Autonomous Intelligent Cyber-Defense Agent. In: Kott, A. (eds) Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Defense Agent (AICA). Advances in Information Security, vol 87. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29269-9_19
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