Biblio
The intranets in modern organizations are facing severe data breaches and critical resource misuses. By reusing user credentials from compromised systems, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attackers can move laterally within the internal network. A promising new approach called deception technology makes the network administrator (i.e., defender) able to deploy decoys to deceive the attacker in the intranet and trap him into a honeypot. Then the defender ought to reasonably allocate decoys to potentially insecure hosts. Unfortunately, existing APT-related defense resource allocation models are infeasible because of the neglect of many realistic factors.In this paper, we make the decoy deployment strategy feasible by proposing a game-theoretic model called the APT Deception Game to describe interactions between the defender and the attacker. More specifically, we decompose the decoy deployment problem into two subproblems and make the problem solvable. Considering the best response of the attacker who is aware of the defender’s deployment strategy, we provide an elitist reservation genetic algorithm to solve this game. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our deployment strategy compared with other heuristic strategies.
Blockchain networks have been claimed to have the potential of fundamentally changing the way humans perform economic transactions with each other. In such networks, trust-enabling agents and activities, that were traditionally arranged in a centralized fashion, are replaced by a network of nodes which collectively yet independently witness and establish the non-repudiability of transactions. Most often, a proof-of-work (PoW) requirement ensures that participants invest resources for joining the network, incentivizing conformance to the network rules, while making it highly infeasible for malicious agents to construct an alternative version of the transaction history. While research on security and efficiency aspects of blockchain networks is already being conducted, there is still work to be done to understand how different external and internal conditions guarantee or threaten their sustainability, i.e., their continuous operation. Focusing on public PoW-based blockchain platforms, in this paper we sketch an abstract model that is aimed at supporting comprehension and qualitative reasoning about the factors that affect sustainability of a blockchain network.