A Comprehensive Threat Assessment Framework for Securing Emerging Technologies

Wireless devices are becoming an integral part of the human environment and their seamless integration has created a range of new wireless sensor network architectures. Unfortunately the security of such networks often lags behind other advances and more often than not is developed only after the core systems and protocols have been standardized. This results in these security schemes having case-specific reactive attributes and being unable to anticipate any changes in the attacker’s attack vector. Integrating security into the next generation computer applications core design is paramount as traditional “reactive” security operations on top of normal functionality will be an expensive and ineffective proposition. The primary focus of this dissertation is to develop a framework that assists in the formulation of proactive security schemes. A proactive security scheme aims at dissuading an adversary from attacking a system by increasing the cost of attack. Such schemes need to be integral to the design of the emerging technologies domain, so that protection against attacks, especially the stealthy and smart ones can be devised. However, to effectively design such schemes, one needs to understand the threats to a system as well as their effects on a system. Threat modeling in itself is a significant research challenge due to the lack of easy to understand techniques or methodologies. The problem of creating a framework which is generic enough for emerging systems and networked applications and can be easily adapted to provide a defender with appropriate attack vectors and risk analysis capabilities is considered. First a paradigm shift in threat modeling by incorporating the attackers perspective in the implementation of an attack and analyzing the various factors that