An innovative network security vulnerability modeling method and tool

This article describes an innovative approach to modeling network designs in order to quantify their ability to mitigate the impact of denial of service attacks on end-user services. The methodology has been developed and implemented into a tool that calculates end-user downtime and failure rate from DoS frequency data and design attributes such as security feature coverage. The application of security vulnerability modeling during design enables designers to evaluate design options and quantify the outage risks for different design strategies. The optimum design can be selected, and verification and operational action plans can be determined.