How segmented is my network?

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Authors: Rohit Dube
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Network segmentation is a popular security practice for limiting lateral movement, yet practitioners lack a metric to measure how segmented a network actually is. We define segmentedness as the fraction of potential node-pair communications disallowed by policy -- equivalently, the complement of graph edge density -- and show it to be the first statistically principled scalar metric for this purpose. Then, we derive a normalized estimator for segmentedness and evaluate its uncertainty using confidence intervals. For a 95\% confidence interval with a margin-of-error of $\pm 0.1$, we show that a minimum of $M=97$ sampled node pairs is sufficient. This result is independent of the total number of nodes in the network, provided that node pairs are sampled uniformly at random. We evaluate the estimator through Monte Carlo simulations on Erdős--Rényi, stochastic block models, and real-world enterprise network datasets, demonstrating accurate estimation. Finally, we discuss applications of the estimator, such as baseline tracking, zero trust assessment, and merger integration.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Cybersecurity and Information Systems Information and Cyber Security Network Security and Intrusion Detection

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
31 January 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint