Survivability analysis of SOA based on attack tree models

Survivability is the ability of a system to continue offering services in the presence of an accident or malicious attacks. The goal of survivability analysis is to identify the system components that are susceptible to attacks and to quantify their capabilities to survive the attacks. In systems based on Service Oriented Architectures, the survivability analysis is fundamentally different from the traditional security centric approaches that have been developed for traditional systems. This paper presents an initial study in adopting the attack tree analysis with formalization for survivability study. From the attack tree analysis, we defined attack tree as a tuple, and then gave an equation for calculating the potential damage. We augmented the attack tree with values signifying the residual damage, and then calculated the survivability of the system.