Unknown Vulnerability Risk Assessment Based on Directed Graph Models: A Survey

Abstract

Nowadays, vulnerability attacks occur frequently. Due to the information asymmetry between attackers and defenders, vulnerabilities can be divided into known and unknown. Existing researches mainly focus on the risk assessment of known vulnerabilities. However, unknown vulnerabilities are more threatening and harder to detect. Therefore, unknown vulnerability risk assessment deserves the widespread attention. To model the exploit process, directed graph models are applied to vulnerability risk assessment. And security metrics are used to quantify the exploitability of vulnerabilities. In this paper, according to the data source of nodes, related works of unknown vulnerability risk assessment based on directed graph models are divided into two types. One is based on network-level data, the other is based on system-level data. The former is to visualize the network status, while the latter is to reflect the running process of the system. The concept and purpose of these directed graph models are given at first. Then, these models are analyzed from three aspects, including advantages, flaws and solutions. After that, challenges and solutions of unknown vulnerability risk assessment based on directed graph models are given. Meantime, security metrics for unknown vulnerability risk assessment based on directed graph models are summarized and classified. Finally, future work directions of unknown vulnerability risk assessment are discussed from the perspective of techniques and application trends. Consequently, this paper can fill in the lack of current survey on unknown vulnerability risk assessment based on directed graph models. INDEX TERMS Directed graph model, risk assessment, security metric, unknown vulnerability.

Mission‐centric decision support in cybersecurity via Bayesian Privilege Attack Graph

“…In recent works, He et al 34 surveyed the use of graph models, including attack graphs and Bayesian networks, to assess risks associated with unknown vulnerabilities. Zimba et al 35 proposed a technique of Bayesian network‐based weighted attack path modeling, including the quantitative characterization of possible attack paths, to capture interlinked attack paths generated by advanced persistent threats upon the exploitation of vulnerabilities of cloud components.…”

A Novel Model for Vulnerability Analysis through Enhanced Directed Graphs and Quantitative Metrics

“…The ISA/IEC 62443-4-1 technical document is divided into eight practices, which specify the secure product development life cycle requirements for both the development and the maintenance phases [ 49 ]. The “Practice 5—Security verification and validation testing” (SVV) section of this document specifies that a process shall be employed to identify and characterize potential security vulnerabilities in the product, including known and unknown vulnerabilities [ 50 , 51 ]. Two requirements in Practice 5 are in charge of the task of analyzing vulnerabilities, as follows: Requirement SVV-3.…”

Modeling Analysis of SM2 Construction Attacks in the Open Secure Sockets Layer Based on Petri Net

“…To overcome the limitations of known vulnerability analysis, many analysis techniques for unknown vulnerabilities have been developed. The study in [ 13 ] showed a solution for unknown vulnerability risk assessment based on directed graphs, which fills the current gap in this research direction of investigation. In [ 14 ], the authors presented a network hardening approach that gives a maximized security solution for unknown and unfixable vulnerabilities by unifying the hardening options under the same model.…”