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Hybrid Attack Graph Generation with Graph Convolutional Deep-Q Learning

Conference ·

Critical infrastructures such as power grids have become increasingly complex, connected, and vulnerable to adverse scenarios, including cyber and physical attacks and faults. Effective risk mitigation for such cyber-physical energy systems (CPES), requires preemptive knowledge of likely adversarial attack scenarios. Hybrid Attack Graph (HAG) is a structured way to represent an adversarial scenario as an attack sequence using a threat model. However, the scarcity of documented attack sequences hinders analysts and CPES planners’ ability to identify credible attack scenarios for a given CPES. We propose a data-driven Graph Convolutional Deep-Q Network (GCDQ) to address this data challenge through generating HAGs. By leveraging limited real-world observations from the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base, our GCDQ model synthesizes realistic graphs with the targeted attribute of minimum detectability via reinforcement learning. This generative model is the first step in creating a tool to substantially boost the attack sequence dataset and enhance the performance of CPS defense-related tasks by providing insights into likely attack sequences with given attributes.

Research Organization:
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
AC05-76RL01830
OSTI ID:
2336568
Report Number(s):
PNNL-SA-191137
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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