Reasoning about Attack Goals for Cyber Resilience

This paper describes our approach to anticipating and recognizing potential cyber threats in order to provide timely responses to those threats. Our approach anticipates attacks on distributed systems by generating a diverse set of attack plans on key system components and then determining the probabilities that these attacks may threaten those components or others that are stepping stones to those systems. The results enable our overall system, STRATUS, to defend these systems by preparing backups and controlling communications pathways appropriately. We present a preliminary empirical study of our techniques, demonstrating their promise.