New Insights into Approaches to Evaluating Intention and Path for Network Multistep Attacks

Table 1

Symbols and their descriptions in this paper.

Symbol	Description
AG	Attack graph
AMC	Absorbing Markov chain
S	Set of all state nodes
O	Set of all transient state nodes
G	Set of all absorbing state nodes
A	Set of all atomic attack nodes
E	Set of total edges in AG
	Set of total edge probabilities
n	Number of all states
t	Number of all transient states
r	Number of all absorbing states
Si	The i-th attack state
	Set of out-going edges of Si
	Edge between and
	Dependent atomic attack from to
	Probability of
EAIP	Expected success probability of attack intention
EAPL	Expected attack path length
P	State transition matrix
P^m	State transition matrix after launching m steps of atomic attacks
Q	Transition matrix of transient states
R	Transition matrix from transient states to absorbing states
N	Fundamental matrix
I	Identity matrix
C	Unit vector
B	Calculation matrix of EAIP
T	Calculation matrix of EAPL
ProbRank	Ranking of absorbing states according to their EAIPs
LengRank	Ranking of transient states according to their EAPLs