Automatic Generation and Analysis of Attack Graphs

Abstract

Attack graphs represent the ways in which an adversary can exploit vulnerabilities to break into a system. System administrators analyze these attack graphs to understand where their system's weaknesses lie and to help decide which security measures will be effective to deploy. In practice, attack graphs are produced manually by Red Teams. Construction by hand, however, is tedious, error-prone, and impractical for attack graphs larger than a hundred nodes. In this talk I present a technique, based on model checking, for generating attack graphs automatically. I also describe different analyses that system administrators can perform in trading off one security measure for another. These analyses can answer questions such as "Given a set of measures, what is a minimum subset needed to make this system safe?" This work is joint with Somesh Jha and Oleg Sheyner.

Bio

Dr. Jeannette M. Wing is the President's Professor of Computer Science and the Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her S.B. and S.M. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1979 and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1983, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor Wing's general research interests are in the areas of specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, and programming languages. She is Director of the Specification and Verification Center at Carnegie Mellon. Her current research focus is on design and measurement techniques for improving the security of software systems.

Professor Wing is a member of the National Academies of Sciences's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and six other academic, industry and government agency boards. She is on the editorial board of five journals including the Journal for the ACM. Professor Wing is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow.