Attack Trees: A Notion of Missing Attacks

Abstract

Attack trees are widely used for security modeling and risk analysis. Classically, an attack tree combines possible actions of the attacker into attacks. In most existing approaches, an attack tree represents generic ways of attacking a system, but without taking any specific system or its configuration into account. This means that such a generic attack tree may contain attacks that are not applicable to the analyzed system, and also that a given system could enable some attacks that the attack tree did not capture.