Cybersecurity for Protection and Control Systems: An Overview of Proven Design Solutions

Reproducible modelling and simulating security vulnerability scanners evaluation framework towards risk management assessment of small and medium enterprises business networks

“…According to the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Risk Management Guide for Information Technology Systems "Risk is a function of the likelihood of a given threat-source's exercising a particular potential vulnerability, and the resulting impact of that adverse event on the organization". (2) The Risk Assessment Methodology can be described in 9 steps and in the following section we'll be examining how the three vulnerability scanners we are comparing (Nessus, OpenVAS and NSE) can be used to gather and present information in regards to each of these steps.…”

“…Threat Identification Threat is described as the potential for a particular threat-source to successfully exploit a vulnerability in a way that can harm the system. (2) Even though sources and motivation for their threat actions cannot be identified by a vulnerability scanner and should be investigated specifically for each organization and its data by the management and the IT professionals, knowing what vulnerabilities exist and where in the system can provide with an indication of who could potentially seek to exploit them and what would be their motivation.…”

“…Finally, vulnerability scanners operate by using plugins that discover known vulnerabilities only which can lead to false negatives due to missing plugins or 0-day exploits. (1,2) The data that vulnerability scanners produce, especially on bigger networks can be overwhelming and it can be difficult to determine the overall security state of a network or a cluster of it that is deemed more important. A way to aggregate the results of vulnerability scanning to produce an overall report for the security of the system would be very useful to the security specialists to monitor the state of the network and where, as well as the priority of actions that need to be taken.…”

“…A way to aggregate the results of vulnerability scanning to produce an overall report for the security of the system would be very useful to the security specialists to monitor the state of the network and where, as well as the priority of actions that need to be taken. (1,2) While this would be a very good first step to help the security specialists in allocating time and resources more efficiently in securing the network a further step could be taken to help them be one step ahead of the attackers, taking into account temporal aspects and dynamic properties of vulnerabilities to create a stochastic model that can "predict the future" by anticipating security gaps on the network that an attacker would aim to exploit and optimizing resource allocation to ensure the efficient protection of key business assets. (1,2) The aim of this report is first to provide a comprehensive framework for the vulnerability analysis assessment of small to medium size enterprises and, secondly, to analyze the free and open available vulnerability scanners in order to adopt the ideal ones as the base of creating such a stochastic model and based on its features to identify how this could potentially be elaborated.…”

“…(1,2) While this would be a very good first step to help the security specialists in allocating time and resources more efficiently in securing the network a further step could be taken to help them be one step ahead of the attackers, taking into account temporal aspects and dynamic properties of vulnerabilities to create a stochastic model that can "predict the future" by anticipating security gaps on the network that an attacker would aim to exploit and optimizing resource allocation to ensure the efficient protection of key business assets. (1,2) The aim of this report is first to provide a comprehensive framework for the vulnerability analysis assessment of small to medium size enterprises and, secondly, to analyze the free and open available vulnerability scanners in order to adopt the ideal ones as the base of creating such a stochastic model and based on its features to identify how this could potentially be elaborated. Although, there are other attempts in the literature (3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8) to provide assessments of vulnerability scanners based on their features and characteristics, offering relevant comparison frameworks, the contribution of this paper lies in the development of a suitable comprehensive, practical and above all reproducible evaluation framework towards modelling and emulating enterprise environment risk assessment.…”