State Space Explosion Mitigation for Large-Scale Attack and Compliance Graphs Using Synchronous Exploit Firing

Abstract

Attack and compliance graphs are useful tools for cybersecurity and regulatory or compliance analysis. Thgraphs represent the state of a system or a set of systems, and can be used to identify all current or future ways the systems are compromised or at risk of violating regulatory or compliance mandates. However, due to their exhaustiveness and thorough permutation checking, these graphs suffer from state space explosion - the graphs rapidly increase in the total number of states, and likewise, their generation time also rapidly increases. This state space explosion in turn also slows the analysis process. This work introduces a mitigation technique called synchronous firing, where graph users and designers can prevent the generation of infeasible states by firing exploits simultaneously through joining inseparable features like time. This feature does not invalidate the integrity of the resulting attack or compliance graph by altering the exhaustiveness or permutation checking of the generation process, but rather jointly fires exploits through their defined inseparable features.