Modeling and Selecting Countermeasures using CP-nets and Answer Set Programming

In this paper, we present CP-defense trees for modelling se- curity scenarios and for expressing qualitative preferences over attacks and countermeasures, and we show how to select the set of preferred countermeasures able to protect a system by translating CP-defense trees to Answer Set Optimization programs which contains preferences among attacks and countermeasures. By computing the optimal answer set of the ASO program corresponding to the CP-defense tree we are able to automatically select the set of preferred countermeasure able to mitigate all the vulnerabilities in the modeled security scenario.