APEX automates post-exploitation chain search, reporting 9 new escalations
Original title: Automated Post-Exploitation Attack Chain Exploration Based on a Phase-guided Hybrid Planning-Monte Carlo Tree Search Algorithm
Tests covered 5 virtual machines, 30 synthetic problems and 291 cloud instances, recovering known and unreported chains.
Researchers present APEX, which treats post-exploitation chain discovery as a planning problem solved by a phase-guided mix of symbolic planning and Monte Carlo tree search. The method groups actions into semantic phases to search host state space and produce multiple chains. On virtual machines, synthetic problems and cloud instances, the authors say it found known chains and previously unreported ones, including nine privilege-escalation vectors, for hardening production hosts.
Unconfirmed: The nine vectors are described as novel by the paper's authors, without independent confirmation here.
- The benchmark used 5 virtual machines, 30 synthetic problems and 291 cloud instances.
- Authors report 9 privilege-escalation vectors they describe as previously unreported.
- Chains may combine benign operations, configuration errors and vulnerability exploitation.
- The planner is meant to improve efficiency and diversity versus earlier explorers.
From the original article
1 min read at arxiv.orgAdvanced attackers in post-exploitation scenarios increasingly craft attack chains that combine benign operations, configuration errors, and vulnerability exploitation to achieve objectives like privilege escalation. While such chains pose significant threats, manually discovering them in complex modern host environments is prohibitively labor-intensive.
By Jie Ying · arxiv.org
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