QR-SACP: Quantitative Risk-based Situational Awareness Calculation and Projection through Threat Information Sharing

When a threat is observed, one of the most important challenges is to choose the most appropriate and adequate timely decisions in response to the current and near future situation in order to have the least consequences and costs. Making the appropriate and sufficient decisions requires knowing what situations the threat has engendered or may engender. In this paper, we propose a quantitative risk-based method called QR-SACP to calculate and project situational awareness in a network based on threat information sharing. In this method, we investigate a threat from different aspects and evaluate the threat's effects through dependency weight among a network's services. We calculate the definite effect of a threat on a service and the cascading propagation of the threat's definite effect on other dependent services to that service. In addition, we project the probability of a threat propagation or recurrence of the threat in other network services in three ways: procedurally, network connections and similar infrastructure or services. Experimental results demonstrate that the QR-SACP method can calculate and project definite and probable threats' effects across the entire network and reveal more details about the threat's current and near future situations.