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

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