Perception of the Environment

TL;DR

This paper explores the complexities of perception in cybersecurity agents, focusing on how perception influences decision-making, the challenges of modeling perception under constraints, and providing a guide for developing perception models within the CYST simulation environment.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive framework for understanding and designing perception models for cybersecurity agents, considering trade-offs and constraints, within the CYST simulation platform.

Findings

Guidelines for perception model development in cybersecurity agents

Analysis of perception constraints like power and bandwidth

Evaluation of perception trade-offs in cybersecurity simulations

Abstract

This chapter discusses the intricacies of cybersecurity agents' perception. It addresses the complexity of perception and illuminates how perception shapes and influences the decision-making process. It then explores the necessary considerations when crafting the world representation and discusses the power and bandwidth constraints of perception and the underlying issues of AICA's trust in perception. On these foundations, it provides the reader with a guide to developing perception models for AICA, discussing the trade-offs of each objective state approximation. The guide is written in the context of the CYST cybersecurity simulation engine, which aims to closely model cybersecurity interactions and can be used as a basis for developing AICA. Because CYST is freely available, the reader is welcome to try implementing and evaluating the proposed methods for themselves.