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Automated Enrichment of Logical Attack Graphs via Formal Ontologies

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ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection (SEC 2023)

Abstract

Attack graphs represent the possible actions of adversaries to attack a system. Cybersecurity experts use them to make decisions concerning remediation and recovery plans. There are different attack graph-building approaches. We focus on logical attack graphs. Networks and vulnerabilities constantly change; we propose an attack graph enrichment approach based on semantic augmentation post-processing of the logic predicates. Mapping attack graphs with alerts from a monitored system allows for confirming successful attack actions and updating according to network and vulnerability changes. The predicates get periodically updated based on attack evidence and ontology knowledge, allowing us to verify whether changes lead the attacker to the initial goals or cause further damage to the system not anticipated in the initial graphs. We illustrate our approach using a specific cyber-physical scenario affecting smart cities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An early version of this work is available in Ref. [12].

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/usnistgov/vulntology.

  3. 3.

    https://www.prelude-siem.com/en/oss-version/.

  4. 4.

    https://www.tenable.com/products/nessus/nessus-essentials.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/Kekere/prelude-elk.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/Kekere/prelude-elk.

  7. 7.

    https://suricata.io/.

  8. 8.

    https://www.rsyslog.com/windows-agent/.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge financial support from the European Commission (H2020 IMPETUS project, under grant agreement 883286) and the Chair CRITiCAL, funded by MITACS (Canada).

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Correspondence to Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro .

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Saint-Hilaire, K., Cuppens, F., Cuppens, N., Garcia-Alfaro, J. (2024). Automated Enrichment of Logical Attack Graphs via Formal Ontologies. In: Meyer, N., Grocholewska-Czuryło, A. (eds) ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection. SEC 2023. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 679. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56326-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56326-3_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-56325-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-56326-3

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