Defending Cyber-Physical Attacks on Oil Pipeline Systems: A Game-Theoretic Approach

The security of critical infrastructures such as oil and gas cyber-physical systems is a significant concern in today's world where malicious activities are frequent like never before. On one side we have cyber criminals who compromise cyber infrastructure to control physical processes; we also have physical criminals who attack the physical infrastructure motivated to destroy the target or to steal oil from pipelines. Unfortunately, due to limited resources and physical dispersion, it is impossible for the system administrator to protect each target all the time. In this research paper, we tackle the problem of cyber and physical attacks on oil pipeline infrastructure by proposing a Stackelberg Security Game of three players: system administrator as a leader, cyber and physical attackers as followers. The novelty of this paper is that we have formulated a real world problem of oil stealing using a game theoretic approach. The game has two different types of targets attacked by two distinct types of adversaries with different motives and who can coordinate to maximize their rewards. The solution to this game assists the system administrator of the oil pipeline cyber-physical system to allocate the cyber security controls for the cyber targets and to assign patrol teams to the pipeline regions efficiently. This paper provides a theoretical framework for formulating and solving the above problem.