Looking for a Black Cat in a Dark Room: Security Visualization for Cyber-Physical System Design and Analysis

Abstract

Today, there is a plethora of software security tools employing visualizations that enable the creation of useful and effective interactive security analyst dashboards. Such dashboards can assist the analyst to understand the data at hand and, consequently, to conceive more targeted preemption and mitigation security strategies. Despite the recent advances, model-based security analysis is lacking tools that employ effective dashboards-to manage potential attack vectors, system components, and requirements. This problem is further exacerbated because model-based security analysis produces significantly larger result spaces than security analysis applied to realized systems-where platform specific information, software versions, and system element dependencies are known. Therefore, there is a need to manage the analysis complexity in model-based security through better visualization techniques. Towards that goal, we propose an interactive security analysis dashboard that provides different views largely centered around the system, its requirements, and its associated attack vector space. This tool makes it possible to start analysis earlier in the system lifecycle. We apply this tool in a significant area of engineering design-the design of cyber-physical systems-where security violations can lead to safety hazards.

Cyberphysical Security Through Resiliency: A Systems-Centric Approach

“…Tools and visualization methods using natural language processing can be used to aid this process. 18,19 As the system is refined, implementation choices with associated details emerge. It is at this phase in the lifecycle development where potential exploits or attack surfaces for the system architecture are captured.…”

Data-Driven Vulnerability Exploration for Design Phase System Analysis

“…For example, changing the definition of a single element to one that has no recorded attacks might significantly increase the security posture of the overall CPS. 1 Moreover, a full GUI is developed based on this methodology to implement further interactivity functions on top of CYBOK [23]. This is a natural progression of CYBOK since in-depth analysis requires the analyst to interact with the data through interactivity functions, for example, filtering, to facilitate effective exploration of the diverse types of data input and output to and by CYBOK [24].…”

Fundamental Challenges of Cyber-Physical Systems Security Modeling

“…Running the prototype tools shows that the total number of attack vectors returned by the search process is large (Table 1). Filtering functionality is implemented to manage these attack vectors [7]. But the general lessons stemming from the large result space is that it is highly sensitive to the fidelity of the model.…”

“…Although the theory and visualization techniques for transitioning to model-based cybersecurity analysis are advancing [2][3][4][5][6][7], there are still several challenges. The first is moving to mature software implementation of security modeling tools that can be run within already existing systems modeling tools.…”