Exploring reinforcement learning for incident response in autonomous military vehicles

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of reinforcement learning to develop autonomous cyber defense agents for unmanned military vehicles, demonstrating the approach's viability from simulation to real-world deployment.

Contribution

It introduces a reinforcement learning framework for autonomous cyber defense in military vehicles, validated through simulation and real-world testing.

Findings

Reinforcement learning agents can effectively respond to cyber attacks.

Simulation training transfers successfully to real vehicle deployment.

Autonomous cyber defense enhances military vehicle resilience.

Abstract

Unmanned vehicles able to conduct advanced operations without human intervention are being developed at a fast pace for many purposes. Not surprisingly, they are also expected to significantly change how military operations can be conducted. To leverage the potential of this new technology in a physically and logically contested environment, security risks are to be assessed and managed accordingly. Research on this topic points to autonomous cyber defence as one of the capabilities that may be needed to accelerate the adoption of these vehicles for military purposes. Here, we pursue this line of investigation by exploring reinforcement learning to train an agent that can autonomously respond to cyber attacks on unmanned vehicles in the context of a military operation. We first developed a simple simulation environment to quickly prototype and test some proof-of-concept agents for an initial evaluation. This agent was then applied to a more realistic simulation environment and finally deployed on an actual unmanned ground vehicle for even more realism. A key contribution of our work is demonstrating that reinforcement learning is a viable approach to train an agent that can be used for autonomous cyber defence on a real unmanned ground vehicle, even when trained in a simple simulation environment.