arXiv subjects

Charilaos Skandylas

Publications and source records attributed to Charilaos Skandylas.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Automated Generation of Cybersecurity Exercise Scenarios

There is a growing need for cybersecurity professionals with practical knowledge and experience to meet societal needs and comply with new standards and regulations. At the same time, the advances in software technology and artificial intelligence point towards a future where software agents will play an important role in protecting the computer systems that are critical for society to function. The training and development of both humans and software agents requires the design and execution of cybersecurity exercises that differ in properties such as size, scope, objectives, difficultly, etc. Cybersecurity scenarios are critical for the operation of cybersecurity exercises as they describe the scope, context, operational environment and storyline of each exercise. In this work, we present an approach to automatically generate cybersecurity scenarios that model enterprise IT systems. Our approach is able to generate a large number of scenarios that differ in multiple criteria including size, scope, difficulty, complexity and diversity. We further release as open source: a simulation and a virtualization environment that can run cybersecurity exercises based on the generated scenarios and a dataset containing 100000 sample scenarios.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Automated Penetration Testing: Formalization and Realization

Recent changes in standards and regulations, driven by the increasing importance of software systems in meeting societal needs, mandate increased security testing of software systems. Penetration testing has been shown to be a reliable method to asses software system security. However, manual penetration testing is labor-intensive and requires highly skilled practitioners. Given the shortage of cybersecurity experts and current societal needs, increasing the degree of automation involved in penetration testing can aid in fulfilling the demands for increased security testing. In this work, we formally express the penetration testing problem at the architectural level and suggest a general self-organizing architecture that can be instantiated to automate penetration testing of real systems. We further describe and implement a specialization of the architecture in the ADAPT tool, targeting systems composed of hosts and services. We evaluate and demonstrate the feasibility of ADAPT by automatically performing penetration tests with success against: Metasploitable2, Metasploitable3, and a realistic virtual network used as a lab environment for penetration tester training.

cs.CR↗