Attack graph reachability: concept, analysis, challenges and issues

Abstract

An attack graph (AG) is an abstraction that represents the paths by which an attacker could break a security policy, leveraging interdependencies among discovered vulnerabilities. However, current AG implementations are inefficient on large-scale networks. The increase of the number of hosts in networks causes an increase in the time it takes to generate the AG, especially the calculation time and the complexity of determining reachability. An attack graph (AG) is an abstraction that represents the paths by which an attacker could break a security policy, leveraging interdependencies among discovered vulnerabilities. However, current AG implementations are inefficient on large-scale networks. The increase of the number of hosts in networks causes an increase in the time it takes to generate the AG, especially the calculation time and the complexity of determining reachability. In this article, the authors examine techniques that calculate the reachability using a matrix or a hyper-graph.