An Attack Graph Based Approach for Threat Identification of an Enterprise Network
Somak Bhattacharya, Samresh Malhotra, Soumya K. Ghosh · IGI Global eBooks · 2009
As networks continue to grow in size and complexity, automatic assessment of the security vulnerability becomes increasingly important. The typical means by which an attacker breaks into a network is through a series of exploits, where each exploit in the series satisfies the pre-condition for subsequent exploits and makes a causal relationship among them. Such a series of exploits constitutes an attack path where the set of all possible attack paths form an attack graph. Attack graphs reveal the threat by enumerating all possible sequences of exploits that can be followed to compromise a given critical resource. The contribution of this chapter is to identify the most probable attack path based on the attack surface measures of the individual hosts for a given network and also identify the minimum possible network securing options for a given attack graph in an automated fashion. The identified network securing options are exhaustive and the proposed approach aims at detecting cycles in forward reachable attack graphs. As a whole, the chapter deals with identification of probable attack path and risk mitigation which may facilitate in improving the overall security of an enterprise network.