This book offers a structured overview and a comprehensive guide to the emerging field of Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Defense Agents (AICA). The book discusses the current technical issues in autonomous cyber defense and offers information on practical design approaches. The material is presented in a way that is accessible to non-specialists, with tutorial information provided in the initial chapters and as needed throughout the book. The reader is provided with clear and comprehensive background and reference material for each aspect of AICA.

Today's cyber defense tools are mostly watchers. They are not active doers. They do little to plan and execute responses to attacks, and they don't plan and execute recovery activities. Response and recovery - core elements of cyber resilience - are left to human cyber analysts, incident responders and system administrators. This is about to change. The authors advocate this vision, provide detailed guide to how such a vision can be realized in practice, and its current state of the art.

This book also covers key topics relevant to the field, including functional requirements and alternative architectures of AICA, how it perceives and understands threats and the overall situation, how it plans and executes response and recovery, how it survives threats, and how human operators deploy and control AICA. Additionally, this book covers issues of testing, risk, and policy pertinent to AICA, and provides a roadmap towards future R&D in this field.