METHOD, PRODUCT, AND SYSTEM FOR GENERATING A SOFTWARE REPRESENTATION THAT EMBODIES NETWORK CONFIGURATION AND POLICY DATA OF A COMPUTER NETWORK FOR USE IN SECURITY MANAGEMENT

Disclosed is an approach for generating a software representation that embodies network configuration and policy data of a computer network for use in security management. The software representation comprises a state machine where different states can be reached using respective transitions or properties which are possible as determined based on the network configuration and network policy data. The states correspond to respective entities on the network which may comprise resources that are identifiable for protection. The software representation can then be stimulated with various inputs to identify sequences of state-to-state transitions which may in turn be processed to generate corresponding detection signatures for use in monitoring the network.