Bridging the gap between business and technology in strategic decision-making for cyber security management

摘要

System architectures are getting more and more complex. Thus, making strategic decisions when it comes to managing systems is difficult and needs proper support. One arising issue that managers need to take into account when changing their technology is security. No business is spared from threats in today's connected society. The repercussions of not paying this enough attention could result in loss of money and in case of cyber physical systems, also human lives. Thus, system security has become a high-level management issue. There are various methods of assessing system security. A common method that allows partial automation is attack graph based security analysis. This particular method has many variations and wide tool support. However, a complex technical analysis like the attack graph based one needs experts to run it and interpret the results. In this paper we study what kind of strategic decisions that need the support of threat analysis and how to improve an attack graph based architecture threat assessment method to fit this task. The needs are gathered from experts working with security management and the approach is inspired by an enterprise architecture language called ArchiMate. The paper contains a working example. The proposed approach aims to bridge the gap between technical analysis and business analysis making system architectures easier to manage.