Formal Description of Cyber Attacks

Abstract

With the ever-evolving cyber attacks as well as defense technologies, the attack behaviors are characterized by uncertainty, complexity, and diversity, and the attack operations are becoming large-scale, synergistic, and multilevel. To study any cyber attacks, it is necessary to establish an objective and scientific and descriptive methodology for accurate feature analysis so as to come up with some general laws based on which the overall defense strategies will be put forward. So far, there is not a universal scientific theoretical model for us to depict the cyber attack behaviors, and the existing theoretical models are proposed for specific scenarios or certain attack categories. The scientific description of cyber attack behaviors is the premise and basis for analyzing the theory of cyber attacks and establishing a general theory of cyber defense. This chapter is an overview or an attempted summary of the existing formal description methods of mainstream network attacks and proposes some preliminary suggestions for the formal analysis of cyber attacks against the complicated dynamic heterogeneous redundant (DHR) network environments. The content herein, though not directly applied in the following chapters, is of guiding significance and reference value for the research on the theory of cyber attacks based on vulnerabilities or backdoors, the formulation of cyberspace defense strategies, and the design of cyber attack defense mechanisms.