Scalable attack graph for risk assessment

The growth in the size of networks and the number of vulnerabilities is increasingly challenging to manage network security. Especially, difficult to manage are multi-step attacks which are attacks using one or more vulnerabilities as stepping stones. Attack graphs are widely used for analyzing multi-step attacks. However, since these graphs had large sizes, it was too expensive to work with. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to manage attack graphs using a divide and conquer approach. To enhance efficiency of risk analyzer working with attack graphs, we converted a large graph to multiple sub-graphs named risk units and provide the light-weighted graphs to the analyzers. As a result, when k order of time complexity algorithms work with an attack graph with n vertices, a division having c of overhead vertices reduces the workloads from n
^k
to r(n + c)
^k
. And the coefficient r becomes smaller geometrically from 2
^−k
depended on their division rounds. By this workload reduction, risk assessment processes which work with large size attack graphs become more scalable and resource practical.