From Passive Defense to Proactive Defence: Strategies and Technologies

The goal of network defense mechanisms is to enable systems to actively detect and withstand attacks, reduce reliance on external security measures, and quickly recover and repair. This paper elaborates on relevant works from both passive defense and proactive defense perspectives. Our first contribution is to introduce strategies and technologies related to passive defense, discussing in detail access control strategies, identity authentication technologies, and firewall technologies. These technologies play a significant role in protecting computer systems and networks from unauthorized access and malicious activities. Addressing the limitations of passive defense, such as: difficult to resolve uncertainty attacks and passive self-defense, our second contribution is to introduce strategies and technologies related to proactive defense. Firstly, we provide a comparative introduction to moving target strategies, intrusion tolerance strategies, and mimic defense strategies. Secondly, based on the mimic defense strategy, we provide a detailed introduction to mimic routers and mimic server technologies, which simulate normal network traffic and service behavior to enhance system security. Moreover, we provide future prospects and suggest potential directions. These approaches can help protect computer systems and networks from various security threats and provide valuable insights for researchers and security professionals on how to address evolving threats.