Title: An intelligent search technique for network security administration

Authors: Somak Bhattacharya, S.K. Ghosh

Addresses: School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, 721302 Kharagpur, India. ' School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, 721302 Kharagpur, India

Abstract: Security is a challenging task for today|s network administration. Usually, attackers penetrate into a network through a chain of exploits. Such an exploit sequence can be termed as an attack path, and the set of all possible attack paths forms an attack graph. In this paper, we propose a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) based approach to find out an attack path consisting of logically connected exploits, which essentially shows the minimum number of exploits required to obtain access over a critical network asset. The solution is further extended to form an attack graph for the enterprise network.

Keywords: intelligent search; network security; attack graph; exploits; vulnerability; planner; AI; artificial intelligence; network administration; attack paths.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAISC.2009.027299

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, 2009 Vol.1 No.2/3/4, pp.338 - 351

Published online: 19 Jul 2009 *

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