Attack Tree Analysis Through Game Playing

This step gives you the option to play simple games by ignoring or preventing certain weaknesses. For example, you may choose not to encrypt some messages due to overhead and ease of use considerations.

The games are played between you (security planner) and the attacker. Both players have objectives (they want to win) and compete with each other for the objective. The steps of the game are:

• If the planner sees weaknesses, then he/she may prevent a certain weakness to disable attacks. This simulates a ‘move’ by the security planner.
• Click on ‘Submit’ to see how the weaknesses enable/disable some attacks. This will simulate the moves by attacker based on the planner move.
• In some cases, the security planner may choose to ignore a certain weakness due to cost, performance and other considerations.
• Even if some weaknesses have been prevented due to earlier steps, the planner should ignore/prevent different weaknesses to simulate his/her moves and to see the type of attacks that are launched by the attacker because of them.
• It is possible to see, in some cases, that ignoring one weakness (for example, not putting password) can enable many different types of attacks.
• It is a good idea to play these games to understand the impact of weaknesses, because all devices of the same type may not be protected at the same level (all access points may not use encryption) and/or new devices may be introduced with no protection.

Game theory is an advanced area of work and the use of game theory in security planning is in its initial stages of research. This step will be considerably strengthened in the future.