Attack Modeling Technology and Methodology

Software protection has matured significantly in recent years. In the commercial world, robust Digital Rights Management (DRM) architectures have evolved. In the government space, concern over binary protection has resulted in powerful techniques to secure executable code. With the momentum towards the next generation secure computing base increasing, the novel binary protection being considered by the military will be incorporated in key OS code modules. Currently, the growth in these technologies has out paced our ability to implement them effectively. Absent is a methodology that will allow the developers of binary protection a means of assessing attacks on binary code. A technology that incorporates information gathered during red teaming and extended through analysis to make predictions of survivability. This document describes research into those key areas required to build a extendable framework able to support binary protection modeling and attack simulation. The primary nodes in this framework will eventually be represented by attack patterns, attack profiles, a dictionary of appropriate terminology and a set of parameters relative to the domain of binary attack. Once in place, this framework will allow the security engineer to selectively build attack trees that effectively model both binary protection and the associated attacks against it.