Abstract
Attack trees are widely used in the fields of defense for the analysis of risks (or threats) against electronics systems, computer control systems or physical systems. Based on the analysis of attack trees, practitioners can define actions to engage in order to reduce or annihilate risks. A major barrier to support computer-aided risk analysis is that attack trees can become largely complex and thus hard to specify. This paper is a first step towards a methodology, formal foundations as well as automated techniques to synthesize attack trees from a high-level description of a system. Attacks are expressed as a succession of elementary actions and high-level actions can be used to abstract and organize attacks into exploitable attack trees. We describe our tooling support and identify open challenges for supporting the analysis of risks.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
We may sometimes display \(level\) in the structure.
- 2.
And even a “sequential” one, ı.e. children of the and-node are considered in order from left to right.
- 3.
As for context-free grammars.
- 4.
In figures, we omit the arity of connectors.
- 5.
More information about ATSyRA is available online: http://tinyurl.com/ATSyRA.
References
AttackTree+. http://www.isograph.com/software/attacktree/
Colange, M., Baarir, S., Kordon, F., Thierry-Mieg, Y.: Towards distributed software model-checking using decision diagrams. In: Sharygina, N., Veith, H. (eds.) CAV 2013. LNCS, vol. 8044, pp. 830–845. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Hong, J.B., Kim, D.S., Takaoka, T.: Scalable attack representation model using logic reduction techniques. In: 12th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, pp. 404–411 (2013)
ISO, Geneva, Switzerland. Norm ISO/IEC 27002 - Information Technology - Security Techniques - Code of Practice for Information Security Management, ISO/IEC 27002:2005 edition, Section 9 (2005)
Jha, S., Sheyner, O., Wing, J.: Two formal analyses of attack graphs. In: Proceedings of the 15th Computer Security Foundation Workshop, pp. 49–63 (2002)
Kordy, B., Mauw, S., Radomirović, S., Schweitzer, P.: Foundations of attack–defense trees. In: Degano, P., Etalle, S., Guttman, J. (eds.) FAST 2010. LNCS, vol. 6561, pp. 80–95. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Kordy, B., Mauw, S., Radomirović, S., Schweitzer, P.: Attack-defense trees. J. Logic Comput. 24(1), 55–87 (2014)
Kordy, B., Piètre-Cambacédès, L., Schweitzer, P.: Dag-based attack and defense modeling: Don’t miss the forest for the attack trees (2013). arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.7397
Mauw, S., Oostdijk, M.: Foundations of attack trees. In: Won, D.H., Kim, S. (eds.) ICISC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3935, pp. 186–198. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Mehta, V., Bartzis, C., Zhu, H., Clarke, E.: Ranking attack graphs. In: Zamboni, D., Kruegel, C. (eds.) RAID 2006. LNCS, vol. 4219, pp. 127–144. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
N. Research and T. O. (RTO). Improving Common Security Risk Analysis. Technical report AC/323(ISP-049)TP/193, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, University of California, Berkeley (2008)
Schneier, B.: Attack trees: modeling security threats. Dr. Dobb’s J. 24, 21–29 (1999)
Schultz, E.E.: Risks due to the convergence of physical security and information technology environments. Inf. Secur. Tech. Rep. 12, 80–84 (2007)
Seamonster. http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/seamonster/
SecurITree. http://www.amenaza.com/
Sheyner, O., Haines, J., Jha, S., Lippman, R., Wing, J.: Automated generation and analysis of attack graphs. In: Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p. 273. IEEE Computer Society (2002)
Sheyner, O.: Tools for generating and analyzing attack graphs. In: de Boer, F.S., Bonsangue, M.M., Graf, S., de Roever, W.-P. (eds.) FMCO 2003. LNCS, vol. 3188, pp. 344–371. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Sheyner, O.M.: Scenario Graphs and Attack Graphs. Ph.D. thesis (2004)
Acknowledgements
This work is funded by the Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA) - Ministère de la Défense, France. We thank Salomé Coavoux and Maël Guilleme for their insightful comments and development around ATSyRA.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pinchinat, S., Acher, M., Vojtisek, D. (2015). Towards Synthesis of Attack Trees for Supporting Computer-Aided Risk Analysis. In: Canal, C., Idani, A. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8938. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15201-1_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15201-1_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15200-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15201-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)