# Attack Trees with Sequential Conjunction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02261 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02261/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Towards Model-based Run-time Cybersecurity: On Control-Flow Anomaly Detection, Attack Identification, and Hardware Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11802/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We provide the first formal foundation of SAND attack trees which are a popular extension of the well-known attack trees. The SAND attack tree formalism increases the expressivity of attack trees by introducing the sequential conjunctive operator SAND. This operator enables the modeling of ordered events. We give a semantics to SAND attack trees by interpreting them as sets of series-parallel graphs and propose a complete axiomatization of this semantics. We define normal forms for SAND attack trees and a term rewriting system which allows identification of semantically equivalent trees. Finally, we formalize how to quantitatively analyze SAND attack trees using attributes.