From Situation Awareness to Action: An Information Security Management Toolkit for Socio-technical Security Retrospective and Prospective Analysis

Inspired by the root cause analysis procedures common in safety, we propose a methodology for a prospective and a retrospective analysis of security and a tool that implements it. When applied prospectively, the methodology guides analysts to assess socio-technical vulnerabilities in a system, helping them to evaluate their choices in designing security policies and controls. But the methodology works also retrospectively. It assists analysts in retrieving the causes of an observed socio-technical attack, guiding them to understand where the information security management of the system has failed. The methodology is tuned to find causes that root in the human-related factors that an attacher can exploit to execute its intrusion.