Hackers vs. Security: Attack-Defence Trees as Asynchronous Multi-Agent Systems
This work addresses security analysis for system designers by providing incremental enhancements to existing Attack-Defence Tree methods.
The paper tackled the problem of quantitatively analyzing security scenarios by enriching Attack-Defence Trees with reactive patterns and attributes like time and cost, and modeling them as Asynchronous Multi-Agent Systems, resulting in a systematic transformation that enables quantification of agent configurations on metrics such as attack time and parametric verification.
Attack-Defence Trees (ADTs) are well-suited to assess possible attacks to systems and the efficiency of counter-measures. In this paper, we first enrich the available constructs with reactive patterns that cover further security scenarios, and equip all constructs with attributes such as time and cost to allow quantitative analyses. Then, ADTs are modelled as (an extension of) Asynchronous Multi-Agents Systems--EAMAS. The ADT-EAMAS transformation is performed in a systematic manner that ensures correctness. The transformation allows us to quantify the impact of different agents configurations on metrics such as attack time. Using EAMAS also permits parametric verification: we derive constraints for property satisfaction. Our approach is exercised on several case studies using the Uppaal and IMITATOR tools.