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Title: Estimation of cyber network risk using rare event simulation
Inherent vulnerabilities in a cyber network’s constituent machine services can be exploited by malicious agents. As a result, the machines on any network are at risk. Security specialists seek to mitigate the risk of intrusion events through network reconfiguration and defense. When dealing with rare cyber events, high-quality risk estimates using standard simulation approaches may be unattainable, or have significant attached uncertainty, even with a large computational simulation budget. To address this issue, an efficient rare event simulation modeling and analysis technique, namely, importance sampling for cyber networks, is developed. The importance sampling method parametrically amplifies certain aspects of the network in order to cause a rare event to happen more frequently. Output collected under these amplified conditions is then scaled back into the context of the original network to provide meaningful statistical inferences. The importance sampling methodology is tailored to cyber network attacks and takes the attacker’s successes and failures as well as the attacker’s targeting choices into account. The methodology is shown to produce estimates of higher quality than standard simulation with greater computational efficiency.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1526383
PAR ID:
10190302
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation: Applications, Methodology, Technology
ISSN:
1548-5129
Page Range / eLocation ID:
154851292093455
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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