Limited Query Graph Connectivity Test

We propose a combinatorial optimisation model called Limited Query Graph Connectivity Test. We consider a graph whose edges have two possible states (On/Off). The edges' states are hidden initially. We could query an edge to reveal its state. Given a source s and a destination t, we aim to test s−t connectivity by identifying either a path (consisting of only On edges) or a cut (consisting of only Off edges). We are limited to B queries, after which we stop regardless of whether graph connectivity is established. We aim to design a query policy that minimizes the expected number of queries.

Our model is mainly motivated by a cyber security use case where we need to establish whether attack paths exist in a given network, between a source (i.e., a compromised user node) and a destination (i.e., a high-privilege admin node). Edge query is resolved by manual effort from the IT admin, which is the motivation behind query minimization.

Our model is highly related to Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation (SBFE). There are two existing exact algorithms for SBFE that are prohibitively expensive. We propose a signifcantly more scalable exact algorithm. While previous exact algorithms only scale for trivial graphs (i.e., past works experimented on at most 20 edges), we empirically demonstrate that our algorithm is scalable for a wide range of much larger practical graphs (i.e., graphs representing Windows domain networks with tens of thousands of edges).

We also propose three heuristics. Our best-performing heuristic is via limiting the planning horizon of the exact algorithm. The other two are via reinforcement learning (RL) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). We also derive an algorithm for computing the performance lower bound. Experimentally, we show that all our heuristics are near optimal. The heuristic building on the exact algorithm outperforms all other heuristics, surpassing RL, MCTS and eight existing heuristics ported from SBFE and related literature.