TY - GEN
T1 - Attack potential in impact & complexity
AU - Allodi, L.
AU - Massacci, F.
PY - 2017/8/29
Y1 - 2017/8/29
N2 - © 2017 ACM.Vulnerability exploitation is reportedly one of the main attack vectors against computer systems. Yet, most vulnerabilities remain unexploited by attackers. It is therefore of central importance to identify vulnerabilities that carry a high 'potential for attack'. In this paper we rely on Symantec data on real attacks detected in the wild to identify a trade-off in the Impact and Complexity of a vulnerability, in terms of attacks that it generates; exploiting this effect, we devise a readily computable estimator of the vulnerability's Attack Potential that reliably estimates the expected volume of attacks against the vulnerability. We evaluate our estimator performance against standard patching policies by measuring foiled attacks and demanded workload expressed as the number of vulnerabilities entailed to patch. We show that our estimator significantly improves over standard patching policies by ruling out low-risk vulnerabilities, while maintaining invariant levels of coverage against attacks in the wild. Our estimator can be used as a first aid for vulnerability prioritisation to focus assessment efforts on high-potential vulnerabilities.
AB - © 2017 ACM.Vulnerability exploitation is reportedly one of the main attack vectors against computer systems. Yet, most vulnerabilities remain unexploited by attackers. It is therefore of central importance to identify vulnerabilities that carry a high 'potential for attack'. In this paper we rely on Symantec data on real attacks detected in the wild to identify a trade-off in the Impact and Complexity of a vulnerability, in terms of attacks that it generates; exploiting this effect, we devise a readily computable estimator of the vulnerability's Attack Potential that reliably estimates the expected volume of attacks against the vulnerability. We evaluate our estimator performance against standard patching policies by measuring foiled attacks and demanded workload expressed as the number of vulnerabilities entailed to patch. We show that our estimator significantly improves over standard patching policies by ruling out low-risk vulnerabilities, while maintaining invariant levels of coverage against attacks in the wild. Our estimator can be used as a first aid for vulnerability prioritisation to focus assessment efforts on high-potential vulnerabilities.
U2 - 10.1145/3098954.3098965
DO - 10.1145/3098954.3098965
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9781450352574
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
BT - ARES 2017 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 12th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, ARES 2017
Y2 - 29 August 2017 through 1 September 2017
ER -