Attack Planning in the Real World
Jorge Lucangeli Obes (1), Carlos Sarraute (1, 2), Gerardo Richarte, (1) ((1) Core Security Technologies, (2) ITBA (Instituto Tecnologico Buenos, Aires))

TL;DR
This paper introduces a method to automatically generate and validate attack paths in real networks by integrating attack graph analysis with automated planning and execution, enhancing penetration testing accuracy.
Contribution
It presents a complete PDDL attack model and an implementation that combines planning with real-world attack execution, addressing scalability and validation challenges.
Findings
The approach scales to medium-sized networks.
Automated attack path generation and validation is feasible.
Performance analysis demonstrates practical applicability.
Abstract
Assessing network security is a complex and difficult task. Attack graphs have been proposed as a tool to help network administrators understand the potential weaknesses of their network. However, a problem has not yet been addressed by previous work on this subject; namely, how to actually execute and validate the attack paths resulting from the analysis of the attack graph. In this paper we present a complete PDDL representation of an attack model, and an implementation that integrates a planner into a penetration testing tool. This allows to automatically generate attack paths for penetration testing scenarios, and to validate these attacks by executing the corresponding actions -including exploits- against the real target network. We present an algorithm for transforming the information present in the penetration testing tool to the planning domain, and show how the scalability…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInformation and Cyber Security · Software Engineering Research · Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
