Research on Quantitative Prioritization Techniques for Selecting Optimal Security Measures

Many organizations and researchers, such as NIST, FIRST, MITRE, etc. in the United States, are conducting various cybersecurity research to counter the evolving cyber threats. Research on improving the security level of systems and networks by checking the network environment is one of the main areas of continuous research. To choose the right security countermeasures, you need to ensure that the defense techniques they contain are appropriate for your systems and networks. However, how to determine this is a difficult and complex issue, and as cyber threats evolve, how to determine this will need to evolve with them. To address these issues, this study quantitatively designed six metrics for defense technologies based on system and network environments and used them to conduct experiments on the entire network, as well as experiments on security countermeasures after a cyber-threat has caused damage in a virtual network environment. The proposed method was able to cover a large number of vulnerabilities relative to the number of mitigation techniques applied, and the prioritized list of mitigation candidates allowed us to select the appropriate list of defense techniques for the network. This research can be developed into an automated technology that collects vulnerabilities for the entire system of the network environment to be applied in the future, measures the defense level, prioritizes the complementary defense technologies, and lists them as defenses.