Towards unifying vulnerability information for attack graph construction

Abstract

Attack graph is used as an effective method to model, analyze, and evaluate the security of complicated computer systems or networks. The attack graph workflow consists of three parts: information gathering, attack graph construction, and visualization. To construct an attack graph, runtime information on the target system or network environment should be monitored, gathered, and later evaluated with existing descriptions of known vulnerabilities. The output will be visualized into a graph structure for further measurements. Information gatherer, vulnerability repository, and the visualization module are three important components of an attack graph constructor. However, high quality attack graph construction relies on up-to-date vulnerability information. There are already some existing databases maintained by security companies, a community, or governments. Such databases can not be directly used for generating attack graph, due to missing unification of the provided information. This paper challenged the automatic extraction of meaningful information from various existing vulnerability databases. After comparing existing vulnerability databases, a new method is proposed for automatic extraction of vulnerability information from textual descriptions. Finally, a prototype was implemented to proof the applicability of the proposed method for attack graph construction. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.