Yoneda Hacking: The Algebra of Attacker Actions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a categorical formalism based on the Yoneda lemma to model attacker actions and system security, enabling analysis of reconnaissance and exploit strategies in cyber-physical systems.

Contribution

It develops a novel algebraic framework using category theory to formally model attacker behaviors and system vulnerabilities, demonstrated on UAV cyber-physical systems.

Findings

Modeling attacker reconnaissance with the Yoneda lemma shows incomplete information can still lead to successful exploits.

The framework captures different attack types, such as rewiring and rewriting, affecting data integrity and availability.

Diagrammatic representations facilitate analysis in model-based design environments.

Abstract

Our work focuses on modeling the security of systems from their component-level designs. Towards this goal, we develop a categorical formalism to model attacker actions. Equipping the categorical formalism with algebras produces two interesting results for security modeling. First, using the Yoneda lemma, we can model attacker reconnaissance missions. In this context, the Yoneda lemma shows us that if two system representations, one being complete and the other being the attacker's incomplete view, agree at every possible test, they behave the same. The implication is that attackers can still successfully exploit the system even with incomplete information. Second, we model the potential changes to the system via an exploit. An exploit either manipulates the interactions between system components, such as providing the wrong values to a sensor, or changes the components themselves, such as controlling a global positioning system (GPS). One additional benefit of using category theory is that mathematical operations can be represented as formal diagrams, helpful in applying this analysis in a model-based design setting. We illustrate this modeling framework using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) cyber-physical system model. We demonstrate and model two types of attacks (1) a rewiring attack, which violates data integrity, and (2) a rewriting attack, which violates availability.