How hard can it be? Quantifying MITRE attack campaigns with attack trees and cATM logic

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nicoletti, Stefano M., Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg, Milan, Stoelinga, Mariëlle, Massacci, Fabio, Budde, Carlos E.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Nicoletti, Stefano M.
Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg, Milan
Stoelinga, Mariëlle
Massacci, Fabio
Budde, Carlos E.
author_facet Nicoletti, Stefano M.
Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg, Milan
Stoelinga, Mariëlle
Massacci, Fabio
Budde, Carlos E.
contents The landscape of cyber threats grows more complex by the day. Advanced Persistent Threats carry out attack campaigns - e.g. operations Dream Job, Wocao, and WannaCry - against which cybersecurity practitioners must defend. To prioritise which of these to defend against, cybersecurity experts must be equipped with the right toolbox to evaluate the most threatening ones. In particular, they would strongly benefit from (a) an estimation of the likelihood values for each attack recorded in the wild, and (b) transparently operationalising these values to compare campaigns quantitatively. Security experts could then perform transparent and accountable quantitatively-informed decisions. Here we construct such a framework: (1) quantifying the likelihood of attack campaigns via data-driven procedures on the MITRE knowledge-base, (2) introducing a methodology for automatic modelling of MITRE intelligence data, that captures any attack campaign via template attack tree models, and (3) proposing an open-source tool to perform these comparisons based on the cATM logic. Finally, we quantify the likelihood of all MITRE Enterprise campaigns, and compare the likelihood of the Wocao and Dream Job MITRE campaigns - generated with our proposed approach - against manually-built attack tree models. We demonstrate how our methodology is substantially lighter in modelling effort, and capable of capturing all the quantitative relevant data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_06692
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How hard can it be? Quantifying MITRE attack campaigns with attack trees and cATM logic
Nicoletti, Stefano M.
Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg, Milan
Stoelinga, Mariëlle
Massacci, Fabio
Budde, Carlos E.
Cryptography and Security
Logic in Computer Science
The landscape of cyber threats grows more complex by the day. Advanced Persistent Threats carry out attack campaigns - e.g. operations Dream Job, Wocao, and WannaCry - against which cybersecurity practitioners must defend. To prioritise which of these to defend against, cybersecurity experts must be equipped with the right toolbox to evaluate the most threatening ones. In particular, they would strongly benefit from (a) an estimation of the likelihood values for each attack recorded in the wild, and (b) transparently operationalising these values to compare campaigns quantitatively. Security experts could then perform transparent and accountable quantitatively-informed decisions. Here we construct such a framework: (1) quantifying the likelihood of attack campaigns via data-driven procedures on the MITRE knowledge-base, (2) introducing a methodology for automatic modelling of MITRE intelligence data, that captures any attack campaign via template attack tree models, and (3) proposing an open-source tool to perform these comparisons based on the cATM logic. Finally, we quantify the likelihood of all MITRE Enterprise campaigns, and compare the likelihood of the Wocao and Dream Job MITRE campaigns - generated with our proposed approach - against manually-built attack tree models. We demonstrate how our methodology is substantially lighter in modelling effort, and capable of capturing all the quantitative relevant data.
title How hard can it be? Quantifying MITRE attack campaigns with attack trees and cATM logic
topic Cryptography and Security
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06692