A real-time automated attack-defense graph generation approach

Abstract

With the increase in cyberattacks, developing appropriate strategies to mitigate and prevent them is essential. In the literature, tools exist that either help prevent or mitigate them. Attack graphs help define mitigation strategies because they help represent and visualize the attacker’s position on a system. However, the mitigation actions are not instantiated on the attack graph. This paper proposes an approach to generate an automated attack-defense graph based on real-time monitored system alerts and an extensive and comprehensive state-of-the-art review. We propose to enrich logical attack graphs generated by a logical reasoner. The enrichment process is possible thanks to a vulnerability ontology that infers additional impacts for an exploited vulnerability. We propose a countermeasure selection approach based on graph matching to generate an optimal Incident Response (IR) playbook. We propose instantiating the generated playbook’s IR actions to get an attack-defense graph in real-time. This instantiation is done thanks to anti-correlation. The anti-correlation ensures that the countermeasures are instantiated on the appropriate attack graph nodes. Only the IR actions whose execution can be launched automatically are applied. We validate our approach using two use-case scenarios that target critical industrial infrastructures. We analyze the countermeasures instantiated on the attack graphs for the scenarios that can achieve the attack goal. We evaluated the approach concerning the security relevance of instantiated countermeasures in attack graphs for several attack paths. The countermeasures instantiated on a node are always relevant to the attacker’s action represented by this node. We also evaluate the approach regarding time performance, considering several situations for the use-case scenarios. The generation time depends on the number of vulnerabilities involved in the scenario. The generation time is on average 0.161 s when the playbook has been generated before the attack defense graph generation process.