Deception Techniques in Computer Security

A recent trend both in academia and industry is to explore the use of deception techniques to achieve proactive attack detection and defense—to the point of marketing intrusion deception solutions as zero-false-positive intrusion detection. However, there is still a general lack of understanding of deception techniques from a research perspective, and it is not clear how the effectiveness of these solutions can be measured and compared with other security approaches. To shed light on this topic, we introduce a comprehensive classification of existing solutions and survey the current application of deception techniques in computer security. Furthermore, we discuss the limitations of existing solutions, and we analyze several open research directions, including the design of strategies to help defenders to design and integrate deception within a target architecture, the study of automated ways to deploy deception in complex systems, the update and re-deployment of deception, and, most importantly, the design of new techniques and experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing deception techniques.