Funded by: Department of Defense, Advanced Research Projects Agency
Administered by: Rome Laboratories
The goal of this project was to study quantitative measures that assess the strength of today's systems to yesterday's attacks (as well as tomorrow's attacks). The premise underlying our approach is that from a theoretical standpoint, reliability assessment, probability of failure assessment, mean-time-to-catastrophic-failure assessment (safety), and testability assessment all quantify characteristics needed in assuring trustworthiness, and Cigital's expertise in developing novel assessment methods for each of these characteristics will engender plausible security assurance metrics.
Our quantitative measures may fail to account for the clever intruder with a novel, new threat scheme, but they consider most classes of security intrusions that are recurring today. A threat is a condition that is a prerequisite to the undesirable event of an intrusion. Our measures allow system vendors to know a priori whether their system is secure against common intrusions. If clever intrusion schemes do occur and are debugged, the prototype can be modified to consider those threats when making future security predictions.
Results from this effort take two forms: (1) a theoretical vulnerability assessment framework and (2) two practical results which will consist of the prototype Security Assessment Tool, the benchmarking of the vulnerability metrics and prototype, as well as design-for-security heuristics.