Learning Cyber Defence Tactics from Scratch with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Recent advancements in deep learning techniques have opened new possibilities for designing solutions for autonomous cyber defence. Teams of intelligent agents in computer network defence roles may reveal promising avenues to safeguard cyber and kinetic assets. In a simulated game environment, agents are evaluated on their ability to jointly mitigate attacker activity in host-based defence scenarios. Defender systems are evaluated against heuristic attackers with the goals of compromising network confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Value-based Independent Learning and Centralized Training Decentralized Execution (CTDE) cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods are compared revealing that both approaches outperform a simple multi-agent heuristic defender. This work demonstrates the ability of cooperative MARL to learn effective cyber defence tactics against varied threats.