Advances in Topological Vulnerability Analysis

Abstract

Currently, network administrators must rely on labor-intensive processes for tracking network configurations and vulnerabilities, which requires a great deal of expertise and is error prone. The organization of networks and the inter dependencies of vulnerabilities are so complex as to make traditional vulnerability analysis inadequate. We describe a Topological Vulnerability Analysis (TVA) approach that analyzes vulnerability dependencies and shows all possible attack paths into a network. From models of the network vulnerabilities and potential attacker exploits, we discover attack paths (organized as graphs) that convey the impact of individual and combined vulnerabilities on overall security. We provide sophisticated attack graph visualizations, with high-level overviews and detail drill down. Decision support capabilities let analysts make optimal tradeoffs between safety and availability, and show how to best apply limited security resources. We employ efficient algorithms that scale well to larger networks.