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

Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs

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

A Comprehensive Insight into Game Theory in relevance to Cyber Security

The progressively ubiquitous connectivity in the present information systems pose newer challenges tosecurity. The conventional security mechanisms have come a long way in securing the well-definedobjectives of confidentiality, integrity, authenticity and availability. Nevertheless, with the growth in thesystem complexities and attack sophistication, providing security via traditional means can beunaffordable. A novel theoretical perspective and an innovative approach are thus required forunderstanding security from decision-making and strategic viewpoint. One of the analytical tools whichmay assist the researchers in designing security protocols for computer networks is game theory. Thegame-theoretic concept finds extensive applications in security at different levels, including thecyberspace and is generally categorized under security games. It can be utilized as a robust mathematicaltool for modelling and analyzing contemporary security issues. Game theory offers a natural frameworkfor capturing the defensive as well as adversarial interactions between the defenders and the attackers.Furthermore, defenders can attain a deep understanding of the potential attack threats and the strategiesof attackers by equilibrium evaluation of the security games. In this paper, the concept of game theoryhas been presented, followed by game-theoretic applications in cybersecurity including cryptography.Different types of games, particularly those focused on securing the cyberspace, have been analysed andvaried game-theoretic methodologies including mechanism design theories have been outlined foroffering a modern foundation of the science of cybersecurity