REAL-TIME IDENTIFICATION OF AN ASSET MODEL AND CATEGORIZATION OF AN ASSET TO ASSIST IN COMPUTER NETWORK SECURITY

摘要

A unique identifier is assigned to a network node and is used to obtain an“asset model”corresponding to the node and to determine whether the node is a member of a particular category. An asset model is a set of information about a node (e.g., the node's role within the enterprise, software installed on the node, and known vulnerabilities/weaknesses of the node). An identifier lookup module determines a node's identifier based on characteristics of the node (such as IP address, host name, network zone, and/or MAC address), which are used as keys into lookup data structures. A category lookup module determines whether a particular node is a member of (i.e., within) a particular category using a transitive closure to model the categories (properties) that can be attached to an asset model. A transitive closure for a particular asset category is stored as a bitmap, similar to bitmap indexing.