Collaborative Research: Algorithmic Aspects of Risk Management

West Virginia University Research Corporation, Morgantown WV

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal is concerned with formal modeling of risk analysis as it relates to the security of systems. Risk analysis in the literature has focused on offline computations in conjunction with a manual response. We propose a real-time approach to risk management by dynamically trading utility for security. A consequence of our approach is that it provides users with the maximum possible functionality for any predefined level of risk tolerance. We model risk management through flow adjustment in a tripartite graphs, with the partitions corresponding to threats, permissions and assets in the system. The focus is on establishing the complexities for the various flow queries in this setting. We have already established that some of the problems in this setting are weakly NP-complete and this raises the possibility of designing polynomial approximation schemes for them.