Current threat models typically consider all possible ways an attacker can
penetrate a system and assign probabilities to each path according to some
metric (e.g. time-to-compromise). In this paper we discuss how this view
hinders the realness of both technical (e.g. attack graphs) and strategic (e.g.
game theory) approaches of current threat modeling, and propose to steer away
by looking more carefully at attack characteristics and attacker environment.
We use a toy threat model for ICS attacks to show how a realistic view of
attack instances can emerge from a simple analysis of attack phases and
attacker limitations.Comment: Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Automated Decision Making for
Active Cyber Defens