Towards Understanding the (In)security of Networked Systems under Towards Understanding the (In)security of Networked Systems under Topology-Directed Stealthy Attacks

Consider a networked system of interest, where "networked" may be in a physical sense, meaning that the nodes are physically connected by point-to-point communication channels, or in a logical sense, meaning that the nodes are connected via edges that reflect certain relationships between the nodes (e.g., trust relationships). In such a system, once some nodes have been compromised, the attack would be directed by the network topology because compromise of a node may cause the compromise of its neighbors. Furthermore, the attack could be crafty or stealthy, meaning that it would always try not to trigger the intrusion detection alarm of the networked system. In such a setting, a question of particular interest to the system administrator is: What is the quantitative security assurance of the networked system? This problem is notoriously known to be difficult, and the state-of-the-art is that we know very little about it. This paper aims to move a step towards resolving this problem