A Colonel Blotto Game for Interdependence-Aware Cyber-Physical Systems Security in Smart Cities

Smart cities must integrate a number of interdependent cyber-physical systems that operate in a coordinated manner to improve the well-being of the city's residents. A cyber-physical system (CPS) is a system of computational elements controlling physical entities. Large-scale CPSs are more vulnerable to attacks due to the cyber-physical interdependencies that can lead to cascading failures which can have a significant detrimental effect on a city. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed for analyzing the problem of allocating security resources, such as firewalls and anti-malware, over the various cyber components of an interdependent CPS to protect the system against imminent attacks. The problem is formulated as a Colonel Blotto game in which the attacker seeks to allocate its resources to compromise the CPS, while the defender chooses how to distribute its resources to defend against potential attacks. To evaluate the effects of defense and attack, various CPS factors are considered including human-CPS interactions as well as physical and topological characteristics of a CPS such as flow and capacity of interconnections and minimum path algorithms. Results show that, for the case in which the attacker is not aware of the CPS interdependencies, the defender can have a higher payoff, compared to the case in which the attacker has complete information. The results also show that, in the case of more symmetric nodes, due to interdependencies, the defender achieves its highest payoff at the equilibrium compared to the case with independent, asymmetric nodes

Game Theory for Secure Critical Interdependent Gas-Power-Water Infrastructure

A city's critical infrastructure such as gas, water, and power systems, are largely interdependent since they share energy, computing, and communication resources. This, in turn, makes it challenging to endow them with fool-proof security solutions. In this paper, a unified model for interdependent gas-power-water infrastructure is presented and the security of this model is studied using a novel game-theoretic framework. In particular, a zero-sum noncooperative game is formulated between a malicious attacker who seeks to simultaneously alter the states of the gas-power-water critical infrastructure to increase the power generation cost and a defender who allocates communication resources over its attack detection filters in local areas to monitor the infrastructure. At the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium of this game, numerical results show that the expected power generation cost deviation is 35\% lower than the one resulting from an equal allocation of resources over the local filters. The results also show that, at equilibrium, the interdependence of the power system on the natural gas and water systems can motivate the attacker to target the states of the water and natural gas systems to change the operational states of the power grid. Conversely, the defender allocates a portion of its resources to the water and natural gas states of the interdependent system to protect the grid from state deviations.Comment: 7 pages, in proceedings of Resilience Week 201

Load Shifting in the Smart Grid: To Participate or Not?

Demand-side management (DSM) has emerged as an important smart grid feature that allows utility companies to maintain desirable grid loads. However, the success of DSM is contingent on active customer participation. Indeed, most existing DSM studies are based on game-theoretic models that assume customers will act rationally and will voluntarily participate in DSM. In contrast, in this paper, the impact of customers' subjective behavior on each other's DSM decisions is explicitly accounted for. In particular, a noncooperative game is formulated between grid customers in which each customer can decide on whether to participate in DSM or not. In this game, customers seek to minimize a cost function that reflects their total payment for electricity. Unlike classical game-theoretic DSM studies which assume that customers are rational in their decision-making, a novel approach is proposed, based on the framework of prospect theory (PT), to explicitly incorporate the impact of customer behavior on DSM decisions. To solve the proposed game under both conventional game theory and PT, a new algorithm based on fictitious player is proposed using which the game will reach an epsilon-mixed Nash equilibrium. Simulation results assess the impact of customer behavior on demand-side management. In particular, the overall participation level and grid load can depend significantly on the rationality level of the players and their risk aversion tendency.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, journal, accepte

Integrating Energy Storage into the Smart Grid: A Prospect Theoretic Approach

In this paper, the interactions and energy exchange decisions of a number of geographically distributed storage units are studied under decision-making involving end-users. In particular, a noncooperative game is formulated between customer-owned storage units where each storage unit's owner can decide on whether to charge or discharge energy with a given probability so as to maximize a utility that reflects the tradeoff between the monetary transactions from charging/discharging and the penalty from power regulation. Unlike existing game-theoretic works which assume that players make their decisions rationally and objectively, we use the new framework of prospect theory (PT) to explicitly incorporate the users' subjective perceptions of their expected utilities. For the two-player game, we show the existence of a proper mixed Nash equilibrium for both the standard game-theoretic case and the case with PT considerations. Simulation results show that incorporating user behavior via PT reveals several important insights into load management as well as economics of energy storage usage. For instance, the results show that deviations from conventional game theory, as predicted by PT, can lead to undesirable grid loads and revenues thus requiring the power company to revisit its pricing schemes and the customers to reassess their energy storage usage choices.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, conferenc