Case Study A: A Prototype Autonomous Intelligent Cyber-Defense Agent

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.