  Assessing network security is a complex and difficult task. Attack graphs
have been proposed as a tool to help network administrators understand the
potential weaknesses of their network. However, a problem has not yet been
addressed by previous work on this subject; namely, how to actually execute and
validate the attack paths resulting from the analysis of the attack graph. In
this paper we present a complete PDDL representation of an attack model, and an
implementation that integrates a planner into a penetration testing tool. This
allows to automatically generate attack paths for penetration testing
scenarios, and to validate these attacks by executing the corresponding actions
-including exploits- against the real target network. We present an algorithm
for transforming the information present in the penetration testing tool to the
planning domain, and show how the scalability issues of attack graphs can be
solved using current planners. We include an analysis of the performance of our
solution, showing how our model scales to medium-sized networks and the number
of actions available in current penetration testing tools.
