A New Approach to Modeling and Analyzing Security of Networked Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel stochastic model inspired by reliability theory to analyze network security, accommodating adaptive attacks and providing analytical insights into security metrics.

Contribution

It presents the first model that incorporates attack adaptiveness into network security analysis, bridging reliability techniques with security considerations.

Findings

Model accommodates adaptive attack strategies.

Provides analytical results for security metrics.

Weakens traditional independence assumptions.

Abstract

Modeling and analyzing security of networked systems is an important problem in the emerging Science of Security and has been under active investigation. In this paper, we propose a new approach towards tackling the problem. Our approach is inspired by the {\em shock model} and {\em random environment} techniques in the Theory of Reliability, while accommodating security ingredients. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first that can accommodate a certain degree of {\em adaptiveness of attacks}, which substantially weakens the often-made independence and exponential attack inter-arrival time assumptions. The approach leads to a stochastic process model with two security metrics, and we attain some analytic results in terms of the security metrics.