The meta attack language - a formal description

• Nowadays, IT infrastructures are involved in making innumerable aspects of our lives convenient, startingwith water or energy distribution systems, and ending with e-commerce solutions and online bankingservices. In the worst case, cyberattacks on such infrastructures can paralyze whole states and lead tolosses in terms of both human lives and money.One of the approaches to increase security of IT infrastructures relies on modeling possible ways ofcompromising them by potential attackers. To facilitate creation and reusability of such models, domainspecific languages (DSLs) can be created. Ideally, a user will employ a DSL for modeling their infrastruc-ture of interest, with the domain-specific threats and attack logic being already encoded in the DSL bythe domain experts.The Meta Attack Language (MAL) has been introduced previously as a meta-DSL for development ofsecurity-oriented DSLs. In this work, we define formally the syntax and a semantics of MAL to ease acommon understanding of MAL’s functionalities and enable reference implementations on different tech-nical platforms. It’s applicability for modeling and analysis of security of IT infrastructures is illustratedwith an example.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Information Systems (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik -- Tillförlitlighets- och kvalitetsteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering -- Reliability and Maintenance (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Datorsystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Computer Systems (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Threat modeling

Attack simulation

Attack graphs

Domain specific language

data- och systemvetenskap

Computer and Systems Sciences

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)