We extend the traditional analysis of network vulnerability by searching for sequences of exploited vulnerabilities distributed throughout a network. While vulnerabilities considered in isolation may seem innocuous, when considered in combination they may lead to serious security breaches. Our approach establishes encoding rules to reason about interdependent vulnerabilities and exploits. It then reasons about the rules to perform critical failure analysis for a given network. We have developed a prototype software tool for automating the analysis, which can be integrated with existing network security tools such as vulnerability databases and network discovery tools. We demonstrate our approach through an example application. We also perform a scaling experiment to show the performance of our approach for larger networks.

Date Published: 8 March 2002
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 4738, Wavelet and Independent Component Analysis Applications IX, (8 March 2002); doi: 10.1117/12.458763

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4738:
Wavelet and Independent Component Analysis Applications IX
Harold H. Szu; James R. Buss, Editor(s)