SAT-solving approaches to context-aware enterprise network security management

Abstract

Enterprise network security management is a complex task of balancing security and usability, with trade-offs often necessary between the two. Past work has provided ways to identify intricate attack paths due to misconfiguration and vulnerabilities in an enterprise system, but little has been done to address how to correct the security problems within the context of various other requirements such as usability, ease of access, and cost of countermeasures. This paper presents an approach based on Boolean satisfiability solving (SAT solving) that can reason about attacks, usability requirements, cost of actions, etc. in a unified, logical framework. Preliminary results show that the approach is both effective and efficient.