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Assessing the risk of complex ICT systems

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Abstract

ICT systems are becoming increasingly complex and dynamic. They mostly include a large number of heterogeneous and interconnected assets (both physically and logically), which may be in turn exposed to multiple security flaws and vulnerabilities. Moreover, dynamicity is becoming paramount in modern ICT systems, since new assets and device configurations may be constantly added, updated, and removed from the system, leading to new security flaws that were not even existing at design time. From a risk assessment perspective, this adds new challenges to the defenders, as they are required to maintain risks within an acceptable range, while the system itself may be constantly evolving, sometimes in an unpredictable way. This paper introduces a new risk assessment framework that is aimed to address these specific challenges and that advances the state of the art along two distinct directions. First, we introduce the risk assessment graphs (RAGs), which provide a model and formalism that enable to characterize the system and its encountered risks. Nodes in the RAG represent each asset and its associated vulnerability, while edges represent the risk propagation between two adjacent nodes. Risk propagations in the graph are determined through two different metrics, namely the accessibility and potentiality, both formulated as a function of time and respectively capture the topology of the system and its risk exposure, as well as the way they evolve over time. Second, we introduce a quantitative risk assessment approach that leverages the RAGs in order to compute all possible attack paths in the system and to further infer their induced risks. Our approach achieves both flexibility and generality requirements and applies to a wide set of applications. In this paper, we demonstrate its usage in the context of a software-defined networking (SDN) testbed, and we conduct multiple experiments to evaluate the efficiency and scalability of our solution.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous referees for their valuable comments which permitted to improve the presentation of the paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Thales Group, Paris, France

    Nizar Kheir

  2. PSL Research University, CNRS, LAMSADE, Université Paris-Dauphine, 75016, Paris, France

    A. Ridha Mahjoub

  3. Université Paris-Dauphine, Paris, France

    M. Yassine Naghmouchi

  4. Orange Labs, Paris, France

    M. Yassine Naghmouchi, Nancy Perrot & Jean-Philippe Wary

Authors
  1. Nizar Kheir
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  2. A. Ridha Mahjoub
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  3. M. Yassine Naghmouchi
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  4. Nancy Perrot
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  5. Jean-Philippe Wary
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to M. Yassine Naghmouchi.

Appendices

Appendix A: Table of notations

In Table 2, we describe the different notations used in this paper.

Table 2 Table of notations
Full size table

Appendix B: Future work

Future work will expand our approach described in this paper through integrating a risk treatment step. A possible illustration of the entire process is provided in Fig. 10. The risk treatment process deals with the following Proactive Countermeasure Selection Problem (PCSP): Given the RAGs, the countermeasures and the security policies (thresholds), find an assignment of countermeasures to the asset-vulnerability nodes that both respects the security policies and minimizes the cost of its deployment. The solution of the problem may be conducted in two steps.

Fig. 10
figure 10

Complete risk management framework

Full size image

PCSP problem modeling

A mathematical programming formulation will be given to model the PCSP.

PCSP problem solving

Based on the formulation, efficient optimization algorithms will be developed to solve the problem. The solver Cplex [39] will be used.

A preliminary work related to this problem is published in [40].

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Kheir, N., Mahjoub, A.R., Naghmouchi, M.Y. et al. Assessing the risk of complex ICT systems. Ann. Telecommun. 73, 95–109 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-017-0617-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-017-0617-0

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