Ravi Jhawar’s research while affiliated with University of Luxembourg and other places

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Publications (9)


Semi-automatically Augmenting Attack Trees Using an Annotated Attack Tree Library
  • Conference Paper

October 2018

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196 Reads

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17 Citations

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Ravi Jhawar

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Karim Lounis

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Yunior Ramírez-Cruz

We present a method for assisting the semi-automatic creation of attack trees. Our method allows to explore a library of attack trees, select elements from this library that can be attached to an attack tree in construction, and determine how the attachment should be done. The process is supported by a predicate-based formal annotation of attack trees. To show the feasibility of our approach, we describe the process for automatically building a library of annotated attack trees from standard vulnerability descriptions in a publicly available online resource, using information extraction techniques. Then, we show how attack trees manually constructed from high level definitions of attack patterns can be augmented by attaching trees from this library.


Chapter 9. Fault Tolerance and Resilience in Cloud Computing Environments

December 2017

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344 Reads

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31 Citations

The increasing demand for flexibility and scalability in dynamically obtaining and releasing computing resources in a cost-effective and device-independent manner, and ease in hosting applications without the burden of installation and maintenance, have resulted in the wide adoption of the cloud computing paradigm. Although the benefits are immense, this computing paradigm is vulnerable to a large number of system failures; as a consequence, there is increasing concern among users regarding the reliability and availability of cloud computing services. Fault tolerance and resilience serve as effective means to address users' concerns regarding reliability and availability. In this chapter, we focus on characterizing the recurrent failures in a typical cloud computing environment, analyzing the effects of failures on user applications, and surveying fault tolerance solutions corresponding to each class of failures. We also discuss the perspective of offering fault tolerance as a service to user applications as an effective means to address users' concerns regarding reliability and availability.


Fig. 1. A human-designed attack tree representing possible threat scenarios 
Refinement-Aware Generation of Attack Trees
  • Conference Paper
  • Full-text available

September 2017

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824 Reads

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24 Citations

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Ravi Jhawar

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[...]

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Tim A. C. Willemse

Attack trees allow a security analyst to obtain an overview of the potential vulnerabilities of a system. Due to their refinement structure, attack trees support the analyst in understanding the system vulnerabilities at various levels of abstraction. However, contrary to manually synthesized attack trees, automatically generated attack trees are often not refinement-aware, making subsequent human processing much harder. The generation of attack trees in which the refined nodes correspond to semantically relevant levels of abstraction is still an open question. In this paper, we formulate the attack-tree generation problem and propose a methodology to, given a system model, generate attack trees with meaningful levels of abstraction.

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A Stochastic Framework for Quantitative Analysis of Attack-Defense Trees

October 2016

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55 Reads

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1 Citation

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Cyber attacks are becoming increasingly complex, practically sophisticated and organized. Losses due to such attacks are important, varying from the loss of money to business reputation spoilage. Therefore, there is a great need for potential victims of cyber attacks to deploy security solutions that allow the identification and/or prediction of potential cyber attacks, and deploy defenses to face them. In this paper, we propose a framework that incorporates Attack-Defense trees (ADTrees) and Continuous Time Markov Chains (CTMCs) to systematically represent attacks, defenses, and their interaction. This solution allows to perform quantitative security assessment, with an aim to predict and/or identify attacks and find the best and appropriate defenses to reduce the impact of attacks.


A Stochastic Framework for Quantitative Analysis of Attack-Defense Trees

September 2016

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93 Reads

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19 Citations

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Cyber attacks are becoming increasingly complex, practically sophisticated and organized. Losses due to such attacks are important, varying from the loss of money to business reputation spoilage. Therefore, there is a great need for potential victims of cyber attacks to deploy security solutions that allow the identification and/or prediction of potential cyber attacks, and deploy defenses to face them. In this paper, we propose a framework that incorporates Attack-Defense trees (ADTrees) and Continuous Time Markov Chains (CTMCs) to systematically represent attacks, defenses, and their interaction. This solution allows to perform quantitative security assessment, with an aim to predict and/or identify attacks and find the best and appropriate defenses to reduce the impact of attacks.


Attack Trees for Practical Security Assessment: Ranking of Attack Scenarios with ADTool 2.0

August 2016

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916 Reads

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60 Citations

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

In this tool demonstration paper we present the ADTool2.0: an open-source software tool for design, manipulation and analysis of attack trees. The tool supports ranking of attack scenarios based on quantitative attributes entered by the user; it is scriptable; and it incorporates attack trees with sequential conjunctive refinement.


Fig. 2. A series-parallel graph 
Attack Trees with Sequential Conjunction

March 2015

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680 Reads

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110 Citations

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

We provide the first formal foundation of SAND attack trees which are a popular extension of the well-known attack trees. The SAND attack tree formalism increases the expressivity of attack trees by introducing the sequential conjunctive operator SAND. This operator enables the modeling of ordered events. We give a semantics to SAND attack trees by interpreting them as sets of series-parallel graphs and propose a complete axiomatization of this semantics. We define normal forms for SAND attack trees and a term rewriting system which allows identification of semantically equivalent trees. Finally, we formalize how to quantitatively analyze SAND attack trees using attributes.


Securing Mission-Centric Operations in the Cloud

November 2013

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24 Reads

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7 Citations

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the use of Cloud Computing facilities to execute critical missions. However, due to their inherent complexity, most Cloud Computing services are vulnerable to multiple types of cyber-attacks and prone to a number of failures. Current solutions focus either on the infrastructure itself or on mission analysis, but fail to consider the complex interdependencies between system components, vulnerabilities, failures, and mission tasks. In this chapter, we propose a different approach, and present a solution for deploying missions in the cloud in a way that minimizes a mission’s exposure to vulnerabilities by taking into account available information about vulnerabilities and dependencies. We model the mission deployment problem as a task allocation problem, subject to various dependability constraints, and propose a solution based on the A ∗ algorithm for searching the solution space. Additionally, in order to provide missions with further availability and fault tolerance guarantees, we propose a cost-effective approach to harden the set of computational resources that have been selected for executing a given mission. Finally, we consider offering fault tolerance as a service to users in need of deploying missions in the Cloud. This approach allows missions to obtain required fault tolerance guarantees from a third party in a transparent manner.

Citations (7)


... While surveys like [16] point at many research approaches that build ATs automatically from data, these usually mine process information or event logs from which they infer an AT. Two relevant examples are [13,37], which use Mitre qualitative data such as Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE) and Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) identifiers in their nodes, or even numeric information such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) or the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) of a vulnerability identified by a CVE. ...

Reference:

How hard can it be? Quantifying MITRE attack campaigns with attack trees and cATM logic
Semi-automatically Augmenting Attack Trees Using an Annotated Attack Tree Library
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • October 2018

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

... While generation strategies exist for all the above approaches [24,23,20,9], the focus of this paper is on the generation of hierarchical models in the style of attack trees, particularly from a "bottom-up" or "vulnerability first" perspective, focusing on the lowest level leaf nodes first. While there is a wide variety of ap-proaches in the literature for generating attack trees, including the use of process calculus to represent communications within a system [25], using a formal enterprise model to derive an attack tree [26], hierarchies of actions sourced from system models or explicitly defined relationships [27] and using a graph based system model to follow the flow of data in a network and derive attack paths [28]. ...

Refinement-Aware Generation of Attack Trees

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

... The authors delved into many categories of failures and explored a range of methodologies employed to provide fault tolerance. The study conducted by Jhawar and Piuri (2017) was notable due to its thorough examination of strategies aimed at improving the dependability and accessibility of cloud services (Jhawar & Piuri, 2017). The study done by Rehman et al. (2022) involved a comprehensive investigation of fault-tolerance in cloud computing. ...

Chapter 9. Fault Tolerance and Resilience in Cloud Computing Environments
  • Citing Chapter
  • December 2017

... Lounis et al. [32] use tokenized continuous time Markov chains (CTMC) to precisely model ADTrees with countermeasures which allows cascade-countermeasure scenarios to be handled in a comprehensive manner. Jhawar et al. [33] also use CTMC for finding the optimal and appropriate defenses to mitigate possible attacks in ADTrees. Buldas et al. [34] presented a constraint programming-based approach for the quantitative analysis of attack trees by generalizing the standard bottom-up approach of calculation. ...

A Stochastic Framework for Quantitative Analysis of Attack-Defense Trees
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • September 2016

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

... We provide QuADTool, a tool for the whole modeling-analysis workflow. The tool can import trees in the DOT format and XML format of ADTool [19]. The graphical interface allows for convenient creating, editing, and combining trees and generating PAC-quantities directly from provided data. ...

Attack Trees for Practical Security Assessment: Ranking of Attack Scenarios with ADTool 2.0
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • August 2016

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

... The cloud computing platform can comprehensively analyze the risks of the cloud computing services, and objectively evaluate the information security capability of the cloud computing service platform, business continuity capability and legality of the platform and services. Since security vulnerabilities are inherent in the infrastructure, service platforms and applications, Mansfield-Devine [26] believe that implementing a vulnerability management program to determine vulnerable areas followed by a good repair mechanism [27] to eliminate the vulnerabilities can safeguard against malware attacks [28]. ...

Securing Mission-Centric Operations in the Cloud
  • Citing Article
  • November 2013

... Besides their similar structure, ats are interesting for this study because they are often analyzed quantitatively to compute security metrics. Typical examples are the minimal time [6], minimal cost [5], or maximal probability [28] of a successful attack, as well as Pareto analyses that study trade-offs among attributes [20]. We are mostly interested in probability propagation, in the at representation of a dependency tree, which we will use to compute the time-bounded likelihood of a vulnerability exploit. ...

Attack Trees with Sequential Conjunction

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology