Abstract: The network attack techniques arc being more diversified, and intelligent, an attacker can often infiltrate a seemingly well-guarded network system using multi-step attacks by exploiting sequences of related vulnerabilities. As the novel vulnerability assessment technique, the attack graph technique analyzes the interaction between the target network and the attacker through the models of these two agents, generates attack graph to show possible attack paths. Because this technology has the capacity to automatically discover the unknown system vulnerabilities and the relationship between vulnerabilities, it is currently a hot subject of research. "l}he attack graph technique has experienced the stage of manual analysis and the stage of the automatic analysis of small-scale network, and is currently in the way of the automatic analysis of large-scale network. In this paper, the development of attack graph technique was summarized and challenges arising from the current research were discussed and some suggestions for the future research work were put forward.

Key words: Vulnerability assessment,Attack graphs,Modeling networks,Modeling attackers