Active Defense Research: A New Perspective Integrating Traps and Vulnerabilities

Active defense represents an asymmetric defensive strategy to reverse the imbalance between offense and defense. It primarily utilizes methods such as interference and deception to raise the cost of attacks and proactively identify potential threats. Within this field, active defense technologies leveraging deception tactics are regarded as a game-changer in cyber warfare. However, existing deception-based defense technologies predominantly focus on attack detection and mitigation, neglecting the possibility of fundamentally resolving the issue, namely preventing attacks by deterring potential adversaries. Recognizing vulnerabilities as the core of cyber warfare, this paper applies the concept of trap deception to vulnerabilities, proposing an active defense technique that confuses and deters attackers. This technique is triggered only when vulnerabilities are exploited, so it can detect, prevent, and trace attacks without impacting the program’s operation. This paper elaborates on the defensive philosophy of this technique and describes its implementation strategies. We argue that this approach holds significant promise in deterring attackers effectively, thereby mitigating the offensive-defense imbalance in cybersecurity.