With the increased use of cyber physical systems in current defense, medical, and energy applications, it is critical for the infrastructure to remain secure. As such, it is important to identify potential security flaws early in the design process in order to produce a consistent, secure and reliable system with minimal fabrication costs. This task can be accomplished using threat modeling. Threat modeling can be separated into two diverse fragments, asset centric and attack centric threat modeling. Asset centric threat modeling takes the point of view of the defender in order to focus on all of ways that a system can be protected from an attack. Attack centric threat modeling on the other hand focuses on the point of view of the attacker, coming up with all of the possible combinations of actions that can result in the compromise of the system. With the interaction of these two perspectives of threat modeling, the system can be tested against possible attack sequences before fabrication, ensuring a high expectation of system security and reliability after development.
This project focuses on developing an attack centric threat modeling tool using the Generic Modeling Environment (GME). The modeling environment is first developed in a consistent manner to a STRIPS planning problem, and then transformed into a single state machine model using the GReAT tool, allowing for the user modeling interface to be integrated with an external planning library. After integrating the model with the Fast Downward Planning library using the GME DSML C# interpreter api, an action plan can be returned, allowing the modeler to identify the possible methods of compromising the system. Furthermore, this attack centric threat modeling tool will be integrated with an asset centric threat modeling tool currently under development, allowing for a full scale threat modeling testbed.