English

Cost-damage analysis of attack trees

Cryptography and Security 2023-04-13 v1 Optimization and Control

Abstract

Attack trees (ATs) are a widely deployed modelling technique to categorize potential attacks on a system. An attacker of such a system aims at doing as much damage as possible, but might be limited by a cost budget. The maximum possible damage for a given cost budget is an important security metric of a system. In this paper, we find the maximum damage given a cost budget by modelling this problem with ATs, both in deterministic and probabilistic settings. We show that the general problem is NP-complete, and provide heuristics to solve it. For general ATs these are based on integer linear programming. However when the AT is tree-structured, then one can instead use a faster bottom-up approach. We also extend these methods to other problems related to the cost-damage tradeoff, such as the cost-damage Pareto front.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.05812,
  title  = {Cost-damage analysis of attack trees},
  author = {Milan Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg and Mariëlle Stoelinga},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.05812},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:01:57.038Z