Quantitative Assessment of Operational Security: Models and Tools *
Marc Daciér, Yves Deswarte Mohamed Kaâniche · 1996
This paper proposes a novel approach to help computing system administrators in monitoring the security of their systems. This approach is based on modeling the system as a privilege graph exhibiting operational security vulnerabilities and on transforming this privilege graph into a Markov chain corresponding to all possible successful attack scenarios. A set of tools has been developed to generate automatically the privilege graph of a Unix system, to transform it into the corresponding Markov chain and to compute characteristic measures of the operational system security. Keywords: quantitative security evaluation, privilege graph, Markov modeling 1. Introduction Computing system security relies mostly on users, operators and administrators, and even the best designed system, if badly operated, would be unsecure. Most authentication and protection mechanisms can be diverted by malicious or careless users, then allowing possible intruders to perform security breaches. This ...