Exploit-based Analysis of Attack Models

Protecting network-accessible resources from unauthorized use requires understanding of network vulnerability. Building attack models as chains of vulnerability exploits by an attacker can help locate flaws to prevent attacks. This paper presents an approach to automatically analyzing security attack models called exploit-based analysis. By using knowledge about exploitability of network vulnerabilities combined with a Markov computational process commonly used in link analysis, exploit based analysis ranks nodes in the attack model in order of their likelihoods of being compromised. The paper discusses the details of the approach, illustrates its use, and compares results with an existing technique.