Biblio

To contest the rapidly developing cyber-attacks, numerous collaborative security schemes, in which multiple security entities can exchange their observations and other relevant data to achieve more effective security decisions, are proposed and developed in the literature. However, the security-related information shared among the security entities may contain some sensitive information and such information exchange can raise privacy concerns, especially when these entities belong to different organizations. With such consideration, the interplay between the attacker and the collaborative entities is formulated as Quantitative Information Flow (QIF) games, in which the QIF theory is adapted to measure the collaboration gain and the privacy loss of the entities in the information sharing process. In particular, three games are considered, each corresponding to one possible scenario of interest in practice. Based on the game-theoretic analysis, the expected behaviors of both the attacker and the security entities are obtained. In addition, the simulation results are presented to validate the analysis.

The intelligent electronic devices widely deployed across the distribution network are inevitably making the feeder automation (FA) system more vulnerable to cyber-attacks, which would lead to disastrous socio-economic impacts. This paper proposes a three-stage game-theoretic framework that the defender allocates limited security resources to minimize the economic impacts on FA system while the attacker deploys limited attack resources to maximize the corresponding impacts. Meanwhile, the probability of successful attack is calculated based on the Bayesian attack graph, and a fault-tolerant location technique for centralized FA system is elaborately considered during analysis. The proposed game-theoretic framework is converted into a two-level zero-sum game model and solved by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) combined with a generalized reduced gradient algorithm. Finally, the proposed model is validated on distribution network for RBTS bus 2.

Large-scale infrastructures are critical to economic and social development, and hence their continued performance and security are of high national importance. Such an infrastructure often is a system of systems, and its functionality critically depends on the inherent robustness of its constituent systems and its defense strategy for countering attacks. Additionally, interdependencies between the systems play another critical role in determining the infrastructure robustness specified by its survival probability. In this paper, we develop game-theoretic models between a defender and an attacker for a generic system of systems using inherent parameters and conditional survival probabilities that characterize the interdependencies. We derive Nash Equilibrium conditions for the cases of interdependent and independent systems of systems under sum-form utility functions. We derive expressions for the infrastructure survival probability that capture its dependence on cost and system parameters, and also on dependencies that are specified by conditional probabilities. We apply the results to cyber-physical systems which show the effects on system survival probability due to defense and attack intensities, inherent robustness, unit cost, target valuation, and interdependencies.

Security evaluation of diverse SDN frameworks is of significant importance to design resilient systems and deal with attacks. Focused on SDN scenarios, a game-theoretic model is proposed to analyze their security performance in existing SDN architectures. The model can describe specific traits in different structures, represent several types of information of players (attacker and defender) and quantitatively calculate systems' reliability. Simulation results illustrate dynamic SDN structures have distinct security improvement over static ones. Besides, effective dynamic scheduling mechanisms adopted in dynamic systems can enhance their security further.

The rate at which cyber-attacks are increasing globally portrays a terrifying picture upfront. The main dynamics of such attacks could be studied in terms of the actions of attackers and defenders in a cyber-security game. However currently little research has taken place to study such interactions. In this paper we use behavioral game theory and try to investigate the role of certain actions taken by attackers and defenders in a simulated cyber-attack scenario of defacing a website. We choose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) model to represent a simulated attacker and a defender in a 2×4 cyber-security game where each of the 2 players could take up to 4 actions. A pair of model participants were computationally simulated across 1000 simulations where each pair played at most 30 rounds in the game. The goal of the attacker was to deface the website and the goal of the defender was to prevent the attacker from doing so. Our results show that the actions taken by both the attackers and defenders are a function of attention paid by these roles to their recently obtained outcomes. It was observed that if attacker pays more attention to recent outcomes then he is more likely to perform attack actions. We discuss the implication of our results on the evolution of dynamics between attackers and defenders in cyber-security games.