Automating environmental vulnerability analysis for network services

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to propose a framework in order to automate the environmental vulnerability assessment of communication protocols and networked services in operational environments. Initially, a network security ontology is defined, to model the environmental characteristics related with the current security status of available communication protocols channels within an examined infrastructure. The functionality of this infrastructure is presented by an ontology. All active communication services are initially identified and enumerated using a combination of different information gathering tools. Then by combining passive scanning and active security analysis tools each active communication service is assessed to output an environmental security score. This score may be utilized in vulnerability scoring systems such as CVSS, to properly adjust relevant scores and to identify implementation or configuration weaknesses in real environments. By using a test environment that involves various networks and communication protocols, we validate the proposed framework and we provide concrete examples for popular communication protocols.