The attacker does not always hold the initiative: Attack trees with external refinement

Abstract

Attack trees provide a structure to an attack scenario, where disjunctions represent choices decomposing attacker’s goals into smaller subgoals. This paper investigates the nature of choices in attack trees. For some choices, the attacker has the initiative, but for other choices either the environment or an active defender decides. A semantics for attack trees combining both types of choice is expressed in linear logic and connections with extensive-form games are highlighted. The linear logic semantics defines a specialisation preorder enabling trees, not necessarily equal, to be compared in such a way that all strategies are preserved. Show more