Asset-Centric Analysis and Visualisation of Attack Trees

Abstract

AbstractAttack trees are an established concept in threat and risk analysis. They build the basis for numerous frameworks aiming to determine the risk of attack scenarios or to identify critical attacks or attack paths. However, existing frameworks do not provide systematic analyses on the asset-level like the probability of successful or near-successful attacks on specific assets. But these insights are important to enable decision-makers to make more informed decisions. Therefore, a generic approach is presented that extends classical attack tree approaches by asset-specific analyses. For this purpose, the attack steps in the attack trees are annotated with corresponding assets. This allows identifying the attack paths each asset is exposed to. In combination with the standard attack tree parameter “probability of attack success”, a set of complementary attack success and protection metrics can be applied on each step of the paths. Furthermore, an integrated visualisation scheme is proposed that illustrates the results in a comprehensible way so that decision-makers can intuitively understand what the metrics indicate. It also includes several features improving usability and scalability. As proof of concept, we have implemented a prototype of our proposed method.KeywordsAttack treesAttack graphsSecurity metricsAssetsVisualisation