Usability Aware Secret Protection with Minimum Cost
Shoma Matsui, Kai Cai

TL;DR
This paper addresses the challenge of protecting system secrets efficiently by balancing security levels, usability, and costs using discrete-event system models and supervisory control theory, including extensions for heterogeneous secrets.
Contribution
It introduces a usability-aware cost model for secret protection, formulates a security problem with minimum cost constraints, and provides algorithms for both homogeneous and heterogeneous secret scenarios.
Findings
Proposed a necessary and sufficient condition for problem solvability.
Developed algorithms based on supervisory control theory for optimal protection.
Validated solutions with a network security example.
Abstract
In this paper we study a cybersecurity problem of protecting system's secrets with multiple protections and a required security level, while minimizing the associated cost due to implementation/maintenance of these protections as well as the affected system usability. The target system is modeled as a discrete-event system (DES) in which there are a subset of marker states denoting the services/functions provided to regular users, a subset of secret states, and multiple subsets of protectable events with different security levels. We first introduce usability-aware cost levels for the protectable events, and then formulate the security problem as to ensure that every system trajectory that reaches a secret state contains a specified number of protectable events with at least a certain security level, and the highest usability-aware cost level of these events is minimum. We first provide…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsPetri Nets in System Modeling · Security and Verification in Computing · Distributed systems and fault tolerance
