A New Approach to Modeling and Analyzing Security of Networked Systems
This work addresses security modeling for networked systems, offering a novel method to handle adaptive attacks, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing reliability techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling and analyzing security in networked systems by proposing a new approach inspired by reliability theory, which accommodates adaptive attacks and weakens common independence assumptions, resulting in a stochastic process model with analytic results for two security metrics.
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.