MTD-Playground: An Attacker-Aware Evaluation Framework for Network Moving Target Defense

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12199v1
• Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:03:06 GMT
• Title: MTD-Playground: An Attacker-Aware Evaluation Framework for Network Moving Target Defense
• Abstract summary: Moving Target Defense (MTD) has emerged as a proactive network cyber defense paradigm.<n>We present MTD-Playground, an attacker-aware evaluation framework for benchmarking path-randomization (PR) MTD techniques.
• Score: 1.4843147079139707
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Moving Target Defense (MTD) has emerged as a proactive network cyber defense paradigm that increases attacker uncertainty through dynamic network reconfiguration techniques such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-enabled path randomization. However, existing evaluations remain fragmented due to inconsistent attacker assumptions, attack scenarios, and evaluation metrics, limiting reproducibility and deployment-oriented comparison. In this paper, we present MTD-Playground, an attacker-aware evaluation framework for benchmarking SDN-enabled path-randomization (PR) MTD techniques under realistic enterprise-style multi-stage attack scenarios. Beyond isolated security and performance metrics, MTD-Playground introduces a composite evaluation methodology for analyzing deployment effectiveness, mutation-interval trade-offs, and defender-attacker operational balance. Using periodic path randomization as a representative PR-MTD strategy, our evaluation shows that aggressive mutation intervals reduce attack success rates to 4-20% while increasing attack completion time to 160-311s across evaluated attack scenarios. At the same time, PR-MTD improves throughput by up to 30.9% and reduces internal-path latency without service interruption. Composite analysis further shows that shorter mutation intervals consistently achieve the highest deployment effectiveness and positive defender advantage. These results demonstrate that SDN-based PR-MTD can substantially disrupt multi-stage attack progression while remaining practically deployable in enterprise environments.

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