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Computational Red Teaming pp 1–45Cite as

The Art of Red Teaming

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Abstract

Red Teaming (RT) has been considered the art of ethical attacks. In RT, an organization attempts to role play an attack on itself to evaluate the resilience of its assets, concepts, plans, and even organizational culture. While historically, RT has been considered a tool by the military to evaluate its own plans, this chapter will remove RT from the military context and take steps to generalize it as an art before discussing it in later chapters as a science. This chapter will first introduce the basic concept of RT, will discuss the characteristics of what makes a successful red team, and present a set of systemic steps to design a RT exercise. The topic necessitates a detailed discussion on the ethics of RT, including the ethical issues to consider when planning the budget and financial commitments of the exercise. To lay the foundation for transforming RT to the computational world, this chapter concludes with an explanation of why RT exercises cannot be fully automated, followed by a discussion on how RT contributes to the field of artificial intelligence.

The commander must work in a medium which his eyes cannot see, which his best deductive powers cannot always fathom; and with which, because of constant changes, he can rarely become familiar.

Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) [49]

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These concepts will be discussed in more details in Chap. 3

  2. 2.

    By self-talking or self-rehearsal, we mean internal conversations that occur in a person’s mind. Imagine you are going to fire someone in the organization that you know very well. Assume you are a people person; that is, you care about people so it is important for you to ensure the person gets hurt as less as possible. You start to rehearse in your own mind what you will say to this person. You may even imagine what the person will reply to you and what you will reply back. This is a form of rehearsal and internal RT within one’s self. Through self-talking, the person reinforces certain concepts and words, a process which helps the person to remember and counteract their internal fears and negative thoughts.

  3. 3.

    Constraints can be hard or soft. Hard constraints can’t be broken, that is, the constraint must be respected or the solution is not accepted. Soft constraints can be broken with a cost. The scope of a RT exercise may need to be updated, or the interaction between red and blue may beg a change in the original scope.

  4. 4.

    For example, a person in a red teaming exercise learns the skills to penetrate a computer system then decides to do so in the real world to commit fraud.

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  1. School of Engineering and Information Technology, University of New South Wales Australia, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Hussein A. Abbass

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Abbass, H.A. (2015). The Art of Red Teaming. In: Computational Red Teaming. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08281-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08281-3_1

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