Modeling and Analyzing Network Vulnerabilities via a Logic-Based Approach

Nowadays, security has become an important issue for network-based applications. The spreading of networks and increasing of their complexity has complicated the task of security analysis, therefore automatic approaches have received more attention recently. This paper proposes a novel and general framework to analyze network vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities can be modelled as precondition and postcondition rules. Some important categories of vulnerabilities have been modelled and an approach has been proposed to prove the attack possibility. This proof is constructive and shows the attack scenario. The framework flexibility allows to model variety of vulnerabilities including some Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerabilities. A real case study has been presented to demonstrate the framework capability.