A Quantitative Risk Analysis Model and Simulation Of Enterprise Networks

In an enterprise network, an attacker can get access and privilege to the critical asset through step by step vulnerabilities exploitation of network devices that lie between them. This security problem is serious concerns for a network security manager to protect from great data loss and business interruption. One of the ways to protect an enterprise network is to analyze network risk at given network topology and security condition. The risk analysis helps the security manager to enforce more security on weak nodes, or shift critical hosts in a secure place before an attacker takes benefit of vulnerabilities on transition devices and compromise highly important hosts. In this paper, we proposed a quantitative risk calculation method to compute network risk. We computed network risk as a function of total vulnerabilities exploitation along path and Impact of exploitation. Previous research including Topological Vulnerability Analysis (TVA) has been done to model and analyze attacking pathway through attack graph generation. They considered only vulnerabilities, and provide ways for the protection of critical hosts. However, in this paper, we analyze the network risk considering both vulnerabilities exploitation and impact of exploits (i.e., compute the total network risk by balancing exploitability and impact). We also perform a simulation analysis on an enterprise network and show how total network risk varies with vulnerabilities exploitation scores and impact scores.