Security analysis of socio-technical physical systems

Abstract

a b s t r a c tRecent initiatives that evaluate the security of physical systems with objects as assets and people as agents -here calledsocio-technical physical systems -have limitations: their agent behavior is too simple, they just estimate feasibility and not the likelihood of attacks, or they do estimate likelihood but on explicitly provided attacks only. We propose a model that can detect and quantify attacks. It has a rich set of agent actions with associated probability and cost. We also propose a threat model, an intruder that can misbehave and that competes with honest agents. The intruder's actions have an associated cost and are constrained to be realistic. We map our model to a probabilistic symbolic model checker and we express templates of security properties in the Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic, thus supporting automatic analysis of security properties. A use case shows the effectiveness of our approach.

Randomness invalidates criminal smart contracts

“…However, it is challenging to prove through derivation of formulae. We thus simulated them by using PRISM [ 16,24], a useful probabilistic model checker that is widely used for modeling and verification of issues such as contract signing and analysis of anonymity [25,26,37,38,34]. PRISM has been evaluated in [12].…”

How to Generate Security Cameras: Towards Defence Generation for Socio-Technical Systems

“…Indeed, it is impossible to model all security-relevant devices, protocols and behaviours in a single model. Typically, socio-technical models look at capturing organisational infrastructure (e.g., [10], [16], [18], [12]), but sometimes they can focus only on some aspects of human-computer interactions (e.g., [19], [6]).…”

“…In [12] the authors work on directly applying model checking to a sociotechnical model in order to evaluate some reachability-based security properties.…”

Case study

“…Lenzini et al [15] provide a modelling formalism to support planning around whether and how a malicious party can gain unauthorised access to resources in a complex physical location. The modelling approach the authors describe allows definition of people and objects within the locations that are being considered.…”