Modeling of Insider Threat using Enterprise Automaton

Substantial portions of attacks on the security of enterprises are perpetrated by Insiders having authorized privileges. Thus insider threat and attack detection is an important aspect of Security management. In the published literature, efforts are on to model the insider threats based on the behavioral traits of employees. The psycho-social behaviors are hard to encode in the software systems. Also, in some cases, there are privacy issues involved. In this paper, the human and non-human agents in a system are described in a novel unified model. The enterprise is described as an automaton and its states are classified secure, safe, unsafe and compromised. The insider agents and threats are modeled on the basis of the automaton and the model is validated using a case study.