Managing attack graph complexity through visual hierarchical aggregation

Abstract

We describe a framework for managing network attack graph complexity through interactive visualization, which includes hierarchical aggregation of graph elements. Aggregation collapses non-overlapping subgraphs of the attack graph to single graph vertices, providing compression of attack graph complexity. Our aggregation is recursive (nested), according to a predefined aggregation hierarchy. This hierarchy establishes rules at each level of aggregation, with the rules being based on either common attribute values of attack graph elements or attack graph connectedness. The higher levels of the aggregation hierarchy correspond to higher levels of abstraction, providing progressively summarized visual overviews of the attack graph. We describe rich visual representations that capture relationships among our semantically-relevant attack graph abstractions, and our views support mixtures of elements at all levels of the aggregation hierarchy. While it would be possible to allow arbitrary nested aggregation of graph elements, it is better to constrain aggregation according to the semantics of the network attack problem, i.e., according to our aggregation hierarchy. The aggregation hierarchy also makes efficient automatic aggregation possible. We introduce the novel abstraction of protection domain as a level of the aggregation hierarchy, which corresponds to a fully-connected subgraph (clique) of the attack graph. We avoid expensive detection of attack graph cliques through knowledge of the network configuration, i.e. protection domains are predefined. While significant work has been done in automatically generating attack graphs, this is the first treatment of the management of attack graph complexity for interactive visualization. Overall, computation in our framework has worst-case quadratic complexity, but in practice complexity is greatly reduced because users generally interact with (often negligible) subsets of the attack graph. We apply our framework to a real network, using a software system we have developed for generating and visualizing network attack graphs. Copyright 2004 ACM.