UNISON: Towards a Middleware Architecture for Autonomous Cyber Defence

The ability of cyber defence systems to support rich sensing, fast response, intelligent decision making and a high degree of autonomy places many demands on the functionality of supporting middleware platforms, necessitating, for example, flexible data persistence that does not rely on dedicated resource pools, as well as reliable, decentralized communications. In this paper we describe the UNISON middleware architecture, which seeks to provide such functionality in the form of loosely-coupled, distributed publish/subscribe messaging, distributed key-value data persistence, and basic local component control. Taken in isolation, the individual parts of UNISON encompass features already present in existing systems and infrastructures, however, UNISON combines these into a consistent whole, providing data storage/distribution and messaging/control in a simple, light-weight and unified fashion. We have prototyped UNISON as a self-standing middleware platform, and have used the resulting prototype to support a (similarly prototypical) generic, autonomous cyber defence system from DST Group´s HINDER project. We discuss our experiences with UNISON in the context of this system. As the UNISON architecture is still work in progress, our aim in this paper is to describe its current state, with the belief that the underlying design decisions will provide valuable insight when attempting to design related software infrastructures for supporting cyber defence systems.