A New Approach to Modeling and Analyzing Security of Networked Systems

Abstract: Modeling and analyzing security of networked systems is an important problem in the emerging Science of Security and has been under active investigation. In this paper, we propose a new approach towards tackling the problem. Our approach is inspired by the {\em shock model} and {\em random environment} techniques in the Theory of Reliability, while accommodating security ingredients. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first that can accommodate a certain degree of {\em adaptiveness of attacks}, which substantially weakens the often-made independence and exponential attack inter-arrival time assumptions. The approach leads to a stochastic process model with two security metrics, and we attain some analytic results in terms of the security metrics.