An uncertain graph-based approach for cyber-security risk assessment

Abstract

We proposed a novel risk assessment approach for quantifying the security risk of lateral movement attacks, in which the attack propagation is modeled as an uncertain graph and the attack impact is a function of the set of compromised devices. We discussed several risk-based security metrics, including the expected loss, survival function, and conditional expectation - the last two measure the low-probability but high-impact events in the right tail of the loss distribution. The model is illustrated with a simple example and several directions for further research are discussed.