Windows Access Control Demystified by Sudhakar Govindavajhala and Andrew W. Appel

In the Secure Internet Programming laboratory at Princeton University, we have been investigating network security management by using logic programming. We developed a rule based framework — Multihost, Multistage, Vulnerability Analysis(MulVAL) — to perform end-to-end, automatic analysis of multi-host, multi-stage attacks on a large network where hosts run different operating systems. The tool finds attack paths where the adversary will have to use one or more than one weaknesses (buffer overflows) in multiple software to attack the network. The MulVAL framework has been demonstrated to be modular, flexible, scalable and efficient [20]. We applied these techniques to perform security analysis of a single host with commonly used software.