8,379 research outputs found
Game Theory Meets Network Security: A Tutorial at ACM CCS
The increasingly pervasive connectivity of today's information systems brings
up new challenges to security. Traditional security has accomplished a long way
toward protecting well-defined goals such as confidentiality, integrity,
availability, and authenticity. However, with the growing sophistication of the
attacks and the complexity of the system, the protection using traditional
methods could be cost-prohibitive. A new perspective and a new theoretical
foundation are needed to understand security from a strategic and
decision-making perspective. Game theory provides a natural framework to
capture the adversarial and defensive interactions between an attacker and a
defender. It provides a quantitative assessment of security, prediction of
security outcomes, and a mechanism design tool that can enable
security-by-design and reverse the attacker's advantage. This tutorial provides
an overview of diverse methodologies from game theory that includes games of
incomplete information, dynamic games, mechanism design theory to offer a
modern theoretic underpinning of a science of cybersecurity. The tutorial will
also discuss open problems and research challenges that the CCS community can
address and contribute with an objective to build a multidisciplinary bridge
between cybersecurity, economics, game and decision theory
Adversarial Risk Análysis for Counterterrorism Modelling
Recent large scale terrorist attacks have raised interest in models for resource allocation against terrorist threats. The unifying theme in this area is the need to develop methods for the analysis of allocation decisions when risks stem from the intentional actions of intelligent adversaries. Most approaches to these problems have a game theoretic flavor although there are also several interesting decision analytic based proposals. One of them is the recently introduced framework for adversarial risk analysis, which deals with decision making problems that involve intelligent opponents and uncertain outcomes. We explore how adversarial risk analysis addresses some standard counterterrorism models: simultaneous defend-attack models, sequential defend-attack-defend models and sequential defend-attack models with private information. For each model, we first assess critically what would be a typical game theoretic approach and then provide the corresponding solution proposed by the adversarial risk analysis framework, emphasizing how to coherently assess a predictive probability model of the adversary’s actions, in a context in which we aim at supporting decisions of a defender versus an attacker. This illustrates the application of adversarial risk analysis to basic counterterrorism models that may be used as basic building blocks for more complex risk analysis of counterterrorism problems
Smart Grid Security: Threats, Challenges, and Solutions
The cyber-physical nature of the smart grid has rendered it vulnerable to a
multitude of attacks that can occur at its communication, networking, and
physical entry points. Such cyber-physical attacks can have detrimental effects
on the operation of the grid as exemplified by the recent attack which caused a
blackout of the Ukranian power grid. Thus, to properly secure the smart grid,
it is of utmost importance to: a) understand its underlying vulnerabilities and
associated threats, b) quantify their effects, and c) devise appropriate
security solutions. In this paper, the key threats targeting the smart grid are
first exposed while assessing their effects on the operation and stability of
the grid. Then, the challenges involved in understanding these attacks and
devising defense strategies against them are identified. Potential solution
approaches that can help mitigate these threats are then discussed. Last, a
number of mathematical tools that can help in analyzing and implementing
security solutions are introduced. As such, this paper will provide the first
comprehensive overview on smart grid security
A Cost-effective Shuffling Method against DDoS Attacks using Moving Target Defense
Moving Target Defense (MTD) has emerged as a newcomer into the asymmetric
field of attack and defense, and shuffling-based MTD has been regarded as one
of the most effective ways to mitigate DDoS attacks. However, previous work
does not acknowledge that frequent shuffles would significantly intensify the
overhead. MTD requires a quantitative measure to compare the cost and
effectiveness of available adaptations and explore the best trade-off between
them. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new cost-effective shuffling
method against DDoS attacks using MTD. By exploiting Multi-Objective Markov
Decision Processes to model the interaction between the attacker and the
defender, and designing a cost-effective shuffling algorithm, we study the best
trade-off between the effectiveness and cost of shuffling in a given shuffling
scenario. Finally, simulation and experimentation on an experimental software
defined network (SDN) indicate that our approach imposes an acceptable
shuffling overload and is effective in mitigating DDoS attacks
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