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Towards Synthesis of Attack Trees for Supporting Computer-Aided Risk Analysis

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Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2014)

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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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We may sometimes display \(level\) in the structure.

  2. 2.

    And even a “sequential” one, ı.e. children of the and-node are considered in order from left to right.

  3. 3.

    As for context-free grammars.

  4. 4.

    In figures, we omit the arity of connectors.

  5. 5.

    More information about ATSyRA is available online: http://tinyurl.com/ATSyRA.

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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.

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Correspondence to Mathieu Acher .

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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

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15201-1_24

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15201-1

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