Biblio

Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are a particularly troubling challenge for software systems. The adversarial nature of the security domain, and APTs in particular, poses unresolved challenges to the design of self-* systems, such as how to defend against multiple types of attackers with different goals and capabilities. In this interaction, the observability of each side is an important and under-investigated issue in the self-* domain. We propose a model of APT defense that elevates observability as a first-class concern. We evaluate this model by showing how an informed approach that uses observability improves the defender's utility compared to a uniform random strategy, can enable robust planning through sensitivity analysis, and can inform observability-related architectural design decisions.

Security researchers do not have sufficient example systems for conducting research on advanced persistent threats, and companies and agencies that experience attacks in the wild are reluctant to release detailed information that can be examined. In this paper, we describe an Advanced Persistent Threat Exemplar that is intended to provide a real-world attack scenario with sufficient complexity for reasoning about defensive system adaptation, while not containing so much information as to be too complex. It draws from actual published attacks and experiences as a security engineer by the authors.