A Defense-Centric Model for Multi-step Attack Damage Cost Evaluation

Abstract

Abstract-Measuring the attack damage cost and monitoring the sequence of privilege escalations play a critical role in choosing the right countermeasure by Intrusion Response System (IRS). The existing attack damage cost evaluation approaches inherit some limitations, such as neglecting the dependencies between system assets, ignoring the backward damage of exploited non-goal services, or omitting the potential damage toward the goal service. In this paper, we propose a defense-centric model to calculate the damage cost of a multistep attack. The main advantage of this model is providing an accurate damage cost by considering not only the damaged services (non-goal services) but also the potential damage toward the attacker target (goal service). To track the attacker's progress and find the attack path, an Attack-Defense Tree (ADT) is used. The model has been implemented in, but is not limited to, the cloud environment and tested with a multistep attack scenario.

A Minimum Defense Cost Calculation Method for Attack Defense Trees

“…In addition, by utilizing the characteristics of the tree structure, studies have adopted algebraic analysis methods for calculating ADTree's quantitative properties. For example, the authors of [30] applied the ADTree to accurately calculate the damage cost of multistep attacks, measure the propagation of attack damage in the network, and choose appropriate countermeasures for minimizing the impact of attacks on services. For the multiparameter optimization of ADTrees, the authors of [31] designed automation techniques for optimizing all parameters.…”

“…To address this issue, we propose an ADTree structure called A2DTree. Based on this [30][31][32] new modeling technology, the minimum defense cost of the system can be easily calculated via algebraic methods. In this section, we first formally define A2DTree.…”