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Attack Simulation for a Realistic Evaluation and Comparison of Network Security Techniques

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Secure IT Systems (NordSec 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11252))

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Abstract

New network security techniques and strategies, such as Moving Target Defense (MTD), with promising narratives and concepts emerge on a regular basis. From a practical point of view, some of the most essential questions in judging a new defense technique are: What kind of attacks—and under which conditions—can be prevented? How does it compare to the state-of-the-art? Are there scenarios in which this technique poses a risk? Answering these questions is often difficult and no common framework for evaluating new techniques exists today.

In this paper we present an early operational version of such a practical evaluation framework that is able to incorporate static and dynamic defenses alike. The main idea is to model realistic networks and attacks with a high level of detail, integrate different defenses into this model, and measure their contribution to security in a given scenario with the help of simulation. To show the validity of our approach we use a small but realistic enterprise network as a case study in which we incorporate different realizations of the MTD technique VM migration. The quantitative results of the simulation based on attacker revenue reveal that VM migration actually has a negative impact on security. Using the log files containing the individual attack steps of the simulation, a qualitative analysis is performed to understand the reason. This combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis options is one of the main benefits of using attack simulation as an evaluation tool.

This research is supported by Rheinmetall.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A table listing all functions with their requirements and effects can be found in the appendix.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Digital Society Institute, ESMT Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Alexander Bajic & Georg T. Becker

Authors
  1. Alexander Bajic
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  2. Georg T. Becker
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexander Bajic .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Nils Gruschka

A Appendix

A Appendix

See Tables 3 and 4.

Table 3. Detailed overview of attacker actions based on exploits
Full size table
Table 4. Detailed overview of attacker actions based on legitimate functions as well as helper functions
Full size table

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Bajic, A., Becker, G.T. (2018). Attack Simulation for a Realistic Evaluation and Comparison of Network Security Techniques. In: Gruschka, N. (eds) Secure IT Systems. NordSec 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11252. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03638-6_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03638-6_15

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