Decentralized semantic threat graphs

  • Authors:
  • Simon N. Foley;William M. Fitzgerald

  • Affiliations:
  • Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Computer Science Department, University College Cork, Ireland;Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Computer Science Department, University College Cork, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • DBSec'12 Proceedings of the 26th Annual IFIP WG 11.3 conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Threat knowledge-bases such as those maintained by MITRE and NIST provide a basis with which to mitigate known threats to an enterprise. These centralised knowledge-bases assume a global and uniform level of trust for all threat and countermeasure knowledge. However, in practice these knowledge-bases are composed of threats and countermeasures that originate from a number of threat providers, for example Bugtraq. As a consequence, threat knowledge consumers may only wish to trust knowledge about threats and countermeasures that have been provided by a particular provider or set of providers. In this paper, a trust management approach is taken with respect to threat knowledge-bases. This provides a basis with which to decentralize and delegate trust for knowledge about threats and their mitigation to one or more providers. Threat knowledge-bases are encoded as Semantic Threat Graphs. An ontology-based delegation scheme is proposed to manage trust across a model of distributed Semantic Threat Graph knowledge-bases.