Risk assessment when malevolent actions are involved

This paper discusses extending systems analysis techniques developed for analyzing the risk of random or unintentional events to the analysis of the risk arising from malevolent actions. Methods for developing sets of attack scenarios useful for risk analysis using logic-gate trees are described. The importance of using a largely qualitative understanding of adversary decision processes to assess the relative attractiveness of different attack scenarios to an adversary is addressed and potential methods for rigorously developing this relative ordering are discussed. The importance of including an evaluation of the effectiveness of protective features implemented to reduce risk is discussed and an analytical approach described. The importance of dependency among elements of an attack scenario is discussed and a method for the efficient handling of such dependencies is described