The TREsPASS project

Information security threats to organisations have changed during the last decade, due to the complexity and dynamic nature of infrastructures and attacks. Successful attacks cost society billions a year, impacting vital services and the economy. Examples include StuxNet, using infected USB sticks to sabotage nuclear plants, and the DigiNotar attack, using fake digital certificates to spy on website traffic. New attacks cleverly exploit multiple organisational vulnerabilities, involving physical security and human behaviour. Current risk management methods provide descriptive tools for assessing threats by systematic brainstorming. Attack opportunities are identified and prevented only if people can envisage them. This process is slow and exceeds the limits of human imaginative capability. Emerging security risks demand tool support to predict, prioritise, and prevent complex attacks systematically. The TREsPASS project will develop methods and tools to analyse and visualise information security risks in dynamic organisations, as well as possible countermeasures. An “attack navigator‿ will be built to identify which attack opportunities are possible and most pressing, and which countermeasures are most effective. To this end, the project combines knowledge from technical sciences (how vulnerable protocols and software are), social sciences (how likely people are to succumb to social engineering), and state-of-the-art industry processes and tools. By integrating European expertise on socio-technical security into a widely applicable and standardised framework, security incidents will be reduced, and organisations and their customers will make informed decisions about security investments. This increased resilience of businesses both large and small is vital to safeguarding the social and economic prospects.