Performance Analysis of Scalable Attack Representation Models

Attack graphs (AGs) have been widely used for security analysis. The construction of the graph-based attack models including the AG have been studied, but the security evaluation considering the full attack paths cannot be computed using existing attack models due to the scalability problem. To solve this, we propose to use hierarchical attack representation models (HARMs). First, we formulate key questions that need to be answered to compare the scalability of existing attack models. We show the scalability of the HARMs via simulations, by taking into account practical attack scenario based on various network topologies.