From attack trees to attack navigators

On Thursday 7th November, the second Cybersecurity Lecture in the jointly organised series between AIT and TU Wien was held. The lecture was given by Prof Wolter Pieters, who is an Assistant Professor in information risk at the Delft University of Techology (TU Delft), in the Netherlands. In addition to this position, he is the project manager of the EU-funded TRESPASS project at University of Twente. Prof Pieters’ talk discussed the challenges of carrying out cybersecurity risk assessment for today’s complex systems, which are subjected to increasingly sophisticated attacker behaviour. In the lecture, the attack navigator concept was introduced, which decouples the model of a system that is being assessed from that of the attacker, which are conceptually tighly-coupled in attack trees, such that different and adaptive attacker behaviours can be more readily analysed. The attack navigator concept and accompanying tool are being developed in the TRESPASS project.

For further information, please download our brochure. The slides from Prof Pieters’ presentation are available on request; please send an email to cybersecurity-lectures(at)ait.ac.at for a copy.

The Cybersecurity Lecture Series is a joint initiative between the AIT Safety and Security Department, and the Automation Systems Group / iSecLab at the TU Wien.