Study of generating attack graph based on privilege escalation for computer networks

All current vulnerability assessment tools only can locate individual vulnerabilities on a single host without considering correlated effect of these vulnerabilities. Aiming at this issue, this paper proposes a method of generating attack graph based on privilege escalation. The vulnerabilities and known attacks with their prerequisites and consequences are modeled based on predicate logic theory and are correlated so as to automatically construct attack graphs with strong operation power of RDBMS. The testing result shows that this system can discover security problems undetectable if only the hosts are assessed individually in a network without simulating attacks. As an application based on relational database, it can be easily integrated with other security tools based on RDBMS.