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

Defensive Cyber Maneuvers to Disrupt Cyber Attackers

erimeter based defenses are limited in deterring and defeating cyberattacks. Multi-layered approaches are needed to provide robust cybersecurity and defend against Advanced Persistent Threats. Proactive defensive cyber actions can provide positional or temporal advantages over an adversary in the cognitive, technical, and physical domains. These actions comprise cyber maneuvers, which are implemented reconfigurations to a network that aim to make attackers more visible and detectable, impede attacker progress, and reduce attackers’ chances of mission success. Technical actions and response are the primary focus of most current cyber defense frameworks with little attention on adversary behavioral and cognitive effects. We describe the enhanced cyber maneuver framework which addresses cognitive and behavioral responses to cyber effects. We present experimental results that demonstrate the framework and a testing approach to collect supporting findings on the effects of cyber maneuvers