The Cascade Vulnerability Problem
Joseph D. Horton, Rodney H. Cooper, W.F. Hyslop, B.G. Nickerson, O.K. Ward, Robert Harland, Elton Ashby, W. M. Stewart · Journal of Computer Security · 1993
A network of computers is vulnerable to the cascading problem when data of a security level d can be passed to a user with a lower security clearance u elsewhere on the network, without having to defeat any single component of the system that has an accreditation range great enough to allow users of level u and data of level d on a single system. An algorithm of time complexity order O(an3) and space complexity O(an2) is given to solve the cascade detection problem, where a is the number of security levels for data, and n is the number of nodes in the network. Also, the cascade correction problem, to remove all cascading paths from a network for a given cost, under restrictive conditions is shown to be NP-complete.