P<inline-formula><tex-math>$^{2}$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="holm-ieq1-2382574.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>CySeMoL: Predictive, Probabilistic Cyber Security Modeling Language

Abstract

This paper presents the Predictive, Probabilistic Cyber Security Modeling Language (P 2 CySeMoL), an attack graph tool that can be used to estimate the cyber security of enterprise architectures. P 2 CySeMoL includes theory on how attacks and defenses relate quantitatively; thus, users must only model their assets and how these are connected in order to enable calculations. The performance of P 2 CySeMoL enables quick calculations of large object models. It has been validated on both a component level and a system level using literature, domain experts, surveys, observations, experiments and case studies.

A Method for Assigning Probability Distributions in Attack Simulation Languages

“…Previous work, including CySeMoL [30], P2CySeMoL [6], and pwnPr3d [31], also employed architectural modeling, in which attacks and defenses were coupled to objects of system architectures and were probabilistically related by Bayesian networks. Their design essentially involved creating its qualitative structure (assets, attacks, defenses, and associations) and populating the qualitative structure with quantitative data (how likely different attacks are to succeed, given the presence or absence of different defenses).…”

“…Threat modeling is used to assess the current state of a system and as a security-by-design tool for developing new systems. A recent improvement is to couple threat modeling with attack simulations [5], [6]. In such simulations, the steps taken by an attacker to compromise system assets are traced, and a time estimate is computed from the initial step to the compromise of assets of interest [2].…”

powerLang: a probabilistic attack simulation language for the power domain

“…Hitherto, we have united the approaches of attack graphs and system modeling in our previous works like P2CySeMoL (Holm et al 2015) and securiCAD (Ekstedt et al 2015). Our central idea was to automatically generate probabilistic attack graphs based on a existing system specification.…”

“…Last, the collected information needs to be processed to detect all weaknesses that can be exploited. To address this, the use of attack simulations based on system architecture models have been proposed (e.g., Ekstedt et al 2015;Holm et al 2015). These approaches take a model of the system and simulate cyber-attacks to identify weaknesses.…”

“…Hitherto, we proposed the use of system architecture models to conduct attack simulations (e.g., Ekstedt et al 2015;Holm et al 2015). However, our previous approaches used static implementations to represent assets and the related security information within the tools.…”