Survey: Automatic generation of attack trees and attack graphs

Abstract

Graphical security models constitute a well-known, user-friendly way to represent the security of a system. These classes of models are used by security experts to identify vulnerabilities and assess the security of a system. The manual construction of these models can be tedious, especially for large enterprises. Consequently, the research community is trying to address this issue by proposing methods for the automatic generation of such models. In this work, we present a survey illustrating the current status of the automatic generation of two popular kinds of graphical security models: Attack Trees and Attack Graphs. The goal of this survey is to present the current methodologies used in the field, compare them, and present the challenges and future directions to the research community.