Quantifying Integrity Impacts in Security Risk Scoring Models

Abstract

Abstract-Organizations are attacked daily by criminal hackers. Managers need to know what kinds of cyber-attacks they are exposed to, for taking defense activities. Attackers may cause several kinds of damages according to the knowledge they have on organizations' configuration and of systems' vulnerabilities. One possible result of attacks is damaging the database. Estimations of attacks' impacts on database integrity are not found in literature, besides intuitive managers' assessments. The aim of this work is defining a quantitative measure, which takes into consideration the known vulnerabilities threatening on database integrity and proving its feasibility. In this work a quantitative integrity impact measure is defined, formulated, illustrated and evaluated. The proposed measure is based on the real database configuration. The superiority of the measure over current practices is illustrated.