A Novel Comprehensive Network Security Assessment Approach

Network security assessment is critical to the survivability and reliability of distributed systems. In this paper, we propose a novel assessment approach that supports automatic vulnerability assessment utilizing Bayesian attack graphs. We also integrate several major vulnerability database into a comprehensive database and build a customized vulnerability scanner to assist attack graph generation. Different from existing solutions that manually assign probabilities to a Bayesian attack graph, we design a set of quantitative metrics to automatically analyze vulnerability and evaluate the proposed approach with real-world examples. Our results show the promising capability of the proposed approach in further improving assessment quality.