A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO ENTERPRISE NETWORK SECURITY MANAGEMENT by

Enterprise network security management is a vitally important task, more so now than ever before. Networks grow ever larger and more complex, and corporations, universities, government agencies, etc. rely heavily on the availability of these networks. Security in enterprise networks is constantly threatened by thousands of known software vulnerabilities, with thousands more discovered annually in a wide variety of applications. An overwhelming amount of data is relevant to the ongoing protection of an enterprise network. Previous works have addressed the identification of vulnerabilities in a given network and the aggregated collection of these vulnerabilities in an attack graph, clearly showing how an attacker might gain access to or control over network resources. These works, however, do little to address how to evaluate or properly utilize this information. I have developed a comprehensive approach to enterprise network security management. Compared with previous methods, my approach realizes these issues as a uniform desire for provable mitigation of risk within an enterprise network. Attack graph simplification is used to improve user comprehension of the graph data and to enable more efficient use o