Efficient Minimum-Cost Network Hardening Via Exploit Dependency Graphs

  • Authors:
  • Steven Noel;Sushil Jajodia;Brian O'Berry;Michael Jacobs

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ACSAC '03 Proceedings of the 19th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

In-depth analysis of network security vulnerabilitymust consider attacker exploits not just in isolation, butalso in combination. The general approach to thisproblem is to compute attack paths (combinations ofexploits), from which one can decide whether a given setof network hardening measures guarantees the safety ofgiven critical resources. We go beyond attack paths tocompute actual sets of hardening measures (assignmentsof initial network conditions) that guarantee the safety ofgiven critical resources. Moreover, for given costsassociated with individual hardening measures, wecompute assignments that minimize overall cost. Bydoing our minimization at the level of initial conditionsrather than exploits, we resolve hardening irrelevanciesand redundancies in a way that cannot be done throughpreviously proposed exploit-level approaches. Also, weuse an efficient exploit-dependency representation basedon monotonic logic that has polynomial complexity, asopposed to many previous attack graph representationshaving exponential complexity.