While the Blackboard Architecture has been in use since the 1980s, it has recently been proposed for modeling computer networks to assess their security. To do this, it must account for complex network attack patterns involving multiple attack routes and possible mid-attack system state changes. This paper proposes a data structure which can be used to model paths from an ingress point to a given egress point in Blackboard Architecture-modeled computer networks. It is designed to contain the pertinent information required for a systematic traversal through a changing network. This structure, called a reality path, represents a single potential pathway through the network with a given set of facts in a particular sequence of states. Another structure, called variants, is used during traversal of nodes (called containers) modeled in the network. The two structures - reality paths and variants - facilitate the use of a traversal algorithm, which will find all possible attack paths in Blackboard Architecture-modeled networks. This paper introduces and assesses the efficacy of variants and reality paths

翻译：自上世纪80年代起，黑板架构便被应用于计算机领域，近期更被提出用于对计算机网络进行安全评估建模。要实现这一目标，必须应对涉及多攻击路径及攻击过程中系统状态变化的复杂网络攻击模式。本文提出一种数据结构，可对黑板架构建模的计算机网络中从入口点到指定出口点的路径进行建模。该数据结构专为系统化遍历动态变化的网络场景而设计，被命名为"现实路径"，用以表示网络中基于特定事实序列在特定状态序列下形成的单一潜在路径。另一种名为"变体"的结构则用于在遍历网络模型中的节点（称为容器）时发挥作用。通过现实路径与变体这两种数据结构的协同，可驱动一种遍历算法，实现对黑板架构建模网络中所有可能攻击路径的完整发现。本文重点介绍并评估了变体与现实路径的效能。