Toward a Theory of Cyber Attacks
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We provide a general methodology for analyzing defender-attacker based "games" in which we model such games as Markov models and introduce a capacity region to analyze how defensive and adversarial strategies impact security. Such a framework allows us to analyze under what kind of conditions we can prove statements (about an attack objective k) of the form "if the attacker has a time budget T_bud, then the probability that the attacker can reach an attack objective ≥ k is at most poly(T_bud)negl(k)". We are interested in such rigorous cryptographic security guarantees (that describe worst-case guarantees) as these shed light on the requirements of a defender's strategy for preventing more and more the progress of an attack, in terms of the "learning rate" of a defender's strategy. We explain the damage an attacker can achieve by a "containment parameter" describing the maximally reached attack objective within a specific time window.
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