235 research outputs found
Multi-Layer Cyber-Physical Security and Resilience for Smart Grid
The smart grid is a large-scale complex system that integrates communication
technologies with the physical layer operation of the energy systems. Security
and resilience mechanisms by design are important to provide guarantee
operations for the system. This chapter provides a layered perspective of the
smart grid security and discusses game and decision theory as a tool to model
the interactions among system components and the interaction between attackers
and the system. We discuss game-theoretic applications and challenges in the
design of cross-layer robust and resilient controller, secure network routing
protocol at the data communication and networking layers, and the challenges of
the information security at the management layer of the grid. The chapter will
discuss the future directions of using game-theoretic tools in addressing
multi-layer security issues in the smart grid.Comment: 16 page
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
On a Generic Security Game Model
To protect the systems exposed to the Internet against attacks, a security
system with the capability to engage with the attacker is needed. There have
been attempts to model the engagement/interactions between users, both benign
and malicious, and network administrators as games. Building on such works, we
present a game model which is generic enough to capture various modes of such
interactions. The model facilitates stochastic games with imperfect
information. The information is imperfect due to erroneous sensors leading to
incorrect perception of the current state by the players. To model this error
in perception distributed over other multiple states, we use Euclidean
distances between the outputs of the sensors. We build a 5-state game to
represent the interaction of the administrator with the user. The states
correspond to 1) the user being out of the system in the Internet, and after
logging in to the system; 2) having low privileges; 3) having high privileges;
4) when he successfully attacks and 5) gets trapped in a honeypot by the
administrator. Each state has its own action set. We present the game with a
distinct perceived action set corresponding to each distinct information set of
these states. The model facilitates stochastic games with imperfect
information. The imperfect information is due to erroneous sensors leading to
incorrect perception of the current state by the players. To model this error
in perception distributed over the states, we use Euclidean distances between
outputs of the sensors. A numerical simulation of an example game is presented
to show the evaluation of rewards to the players and the preferred strategies.
We also present the conditions for formulating the strategies when dealing with
more than one attacker and making collaborations.Comment: 31 page
Honeypot Allocation for Cyber Deception in Dynamic Tactical Networks: A Game Theoretic Approach
Honeypots play a crucial role in implementing various cyber deception
techniques as they possess the capability to divert attackers away from
valuable assets. Careful strategic placement of honeypots in networks should
consider not only network aspects but also attackers' preferences. The
allocation of honeypots in tactical networks under network mobility is of great
interest. To achieve this objective, we present a game-theoretic approach that
generates optimal honeypot allocation strategies within an attack/defense
scenario. Our proposed approach takes into consideration the changes in network
connectivity. In particular, we introduce a two-player dynamic game model that
explicitly incorporates the future state evolution resulting from changes in
network connectivity. The defender's objective is twofold: to maximize the
likelihood of the attacker hitting a honeypot and to minimize the cost
associated with deception and reconfiguration due to changes in network
topology. We present an iterative algorithm to find Nash equilibrium strategies
and analyze the scalability of the algorithm. Finally, we validate our approach
and present numerical results based on simulations, demonstrating that our game
model successfully enhances network security. Additionally, we have proposed
additional enhancements to improve the scalability of the proposed approach.Comment: This paper accepted in 14th International Conference on Decision and
Game Theory for Security, GameSec 202
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