Abstract
Attacks on systems and organisations increasingly exploit human actors, for example through social engineering. This non-technical aspect of attacks complicates their formal treatment and automatic identification. Formalisation of human behaviour is difficult at best, and attacks on socio-technical systems are still mostly identified through brainstorming of experts. In this work we discuss several approaches to formalising socio-technical systems and their analysis. Starting from a flow logic-based analysis of the insider threat, we discuss how to include the socio aspects explicitly, and show a formalisation that proves properties of this formalisation. On the formal side, our work closes the gap between formal and informal approaches to socio-technical systems. On the informal side, we show how to steal a birthday cake from a bakery by social engineering.
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Notes
- 1.
To simplify treatment we assume the bakery to be high-tech. A different approach would have been to model the baking process at the baker or the bakery, requiring the recipe as input.
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Acknowledgments
Part of the research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 318003 (TRE\(_\mathrm {S}\)PASS). This publication reflects only the authors’ views and the Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained herein.
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Probst, C.W., Kammüller, F., Hansen, R.R. (2016). Formal Modelling and Analysis of Socio-Technical Systems. In: Probst, C., Hankin, C., Hansen, R. (eds) Semantics, Logics, and Calculi. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9560. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27810-0_3
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