Resilience Requirements, Design, and Testing - July 2017

Public Audience
PI(s):  Kevin Sullivan, Mladen Vouk, Ehab Al-Shaer
Researchers: Mohamed Alsaleh (UNCC), Md Mazharul Islam (UNCC), Anoosha Vangaveeti (NCSU), Chong Tang (UVA)

HARD PROBLEM(S) ADDRESSED

Characterization of attack-resiliency of software based systems needs to be done from its very inception because without such characterization attack resiliency is not properly testable or implementable.

• Resilient Architectures - vulnerability avoidance, evaluation and tolerance strategies and architectures.
• Security Metrics and Models - development of metrics and models for static and dynamic assessment of resilience of software.

PUBLICATIONS

ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

• Measuring cyber risk requires a comprehensive assessment of both (1) the end-host security assessment based on vulnerability analysis and policy compliance, and (2) network security that provides resistance against initiated or targeted to end-hosts. This comprehensive determination of cyber risk is key for automated security configuration synthesis which is the holy grail of cyber. In this quarter, we addressed these challenges by developed new metrics, for assessing global cyber risk for enterprises. First, we developed Network Threat Resistance (NTR) metric to measure the effect of network counter-measures techniques (such as filtering, header/payload inspection, encryption, authentication) on preventing or detecting the propagation of an exploit of a specific vulnerability. Based on NTR, we measure the Cyber Threat Exposure (CTE) for a specific service considering the quantity and capability of the vulnerable sources that can reach this service and the network resistance. We then show how to measure the global cyber risk of enterprises using both NTR and CTE metrics.