Practical Graph Optimisation and AI-Driven Models for Active Directory Security Hardening

Abstract

Microsoft's Active Directory (AD) is a directory service that enables the IT admin to manage security permissions and control access within a Windows domain network. As a core management system in many of organisation, AD has become a primary target for adversaries. While many solutions for hardening attack graphs exist, these efforts fall short in addressing several key practical challenges specific to the AD attack graph. First, existing models often assume the graph is static, whereas a real-world AD environment is highly dynamic. Second, most proposed solutions are limited to the defensive measure of revoking vulnerabilities (edge removal), while more active defence mechanisms are largely unstudied. Third, because not all remediations are implementable, a practical end-to-end model must incorporate system admin feedback into the prioritisation process. This thesis aims to address these limitations by studying and proposing a number of game-theoretic and optimisation-based decision-making models. First, we propose a honeypot/decoy placement model based on the principle of minimising the number of shortest paths and the number of Domain Admin-reachable nodes. Second, building on this model, we introduce a defence strategy that considers the dynamic/temporal nature of the AD graph, where the objective is to find the location to deploy decoys that maximises the worst-case incident response time. Third, we introduce an adaptive prioritisation model that queries each high-risk attack path to the IT administrator for mediation. Finally, we introduce an end-to-end adaptive prioritisation model that minimises the approval effort of the system admin by finding a general adaptive edge-removal policy that generalises the system admin's decisions to edges with similar risk features. We show that the problems underlying all of the contributed models are computationally intractable.