Modelling Telecommunications Operators and Adversaries using Game Theory

Telecommunications systems being inherently distributed and collaborative in nature present a plurality of attack surfaces to malicious entities and hence vulnerable to many potential attacks even indirectly demanding a need in prioritising security. The choice of security implementations depends upon the currently understood threats, future possible threat vectors, and the dependencies between systems. Executing these choices while contemplating the financial aspects is exceptionally difficult. It is thus critical to have a perceptible decision support framework for better security decision-making. This thesis studies the strategic nature of the interaction between the Telecoms operators and attackers utilising game theory to understand their strategic decision-making characteristics strengthening security decisions. To understand the security investment decision-making criteria of operators, this thesis utilises static security investment games. Through these games, we study the effects of security investment decision of an operator on other operators' behaviour. We determine conditions supporting the security investment decisions and propose strategic recommendations supplementing the dependency conditions. We then study attackers' behaviour considering them with strategic incentives in contrary to their strictly-bounded rationality in traditional game-theoretic modelling approaches. We utilise a behavioural approach and design a decision-flow model capturing the choices of attackers in the attack process. An outcome of this work is a generalised attack framework. Moreover, using this framework, we derive attack strategies optimising attackers' effort. Through this work, we are probing the foundations for drawing inferences about attackers' strategic characteristics from a cybersecurity perspective

Thinking Styles and Privacy Decisions: Need for Cognition, Faith into Intuition, and the Privacy Calculus

Investigating cognitive processes that underlie privacy-related decisions, prior research has primarily adopted a privacy calculus view, indicating privacy-related decisions to constitute rational anticipations of risks and benefits connected to data disclosure. Referring to psychological limitations and heuristic thinking, however, recent research has discussed notions of bounded rationality in this context. Adopting this view, the current research argues that privacy decisions are guided by thinking styles, i.e. individual preferences to decide in an either rational or intuitive way. Results of a survey indicated that individuals high in rational thinking, as reflected by a high need for cognition, anticipated and weighed risk and benefits more thoroughly. In contrast, individuals relying on experiential thinking (as reflected by a high faith into intuition) overleaped rational considerations and relied on their hunches rather than a privacy calculus when assessing intentions to disclose information. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed

Barriers to industrial energy efficiency: a literature review

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