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 the characteristics of emulsion chamber family events produced in low heights

The uncertainty of the primary cosmic ray composition at 10 to the 14th power -10 to the 16th power eV is well known to make the study of the nuclear interaction mechanism more difficult. Experimentally considering, if one can identify effectively the family events which are produced in low heights, then an event sample induced by primary protons might be able to be separated. It is undoubtedly very meaningful. In this paper an attempt is made to simulate the family events under the condition of mountain emulsion chamber experiments with a reasonable model. The aim is to search for the dependence of some experimentally observable quantities to the interaction height

Analysis of synaptic weight distribution in an Izhikevich network

Izhikevich network is a relatively new neuronal network, which consists of cortical spiking model neurons with axonal conduction delays and spike-timingdependent plasticity (STDP) with hard bound adaptation. In this work, we use uniform and Gaussian distributions respectively to initialize the weights of all excitatory neurons. After the network undergoes a few minutes of STDP adaptation, we can see that the weights of all synapses in the network, for both initial weight distributions, form a bimodal distribution, and numerically the established distribution presents dynamic stability

A Dynamical Analysis of the Suitability of Prehistoric Spheroids from the Cave of Hearths as Thrown Projectiles

Spheroids are ball-shaped stone objects found in African archaeological sites dating from 1.8 million years ago (Early Stone Age) to at least 70,000 years ago (Middle Stone Age). Spheroids are either fabricated or naturally shaped stones selected and transported to places of use making them one of the longest-used technologies on record. Most hypotheses about their use suggest they were percussive tools for shaping or grinding other materials. However, their size and spherical shape make them potentially useful as projectile weapons, a property that, uniquely, humans have been specialised to exploit for millions of years. Here we show (using simulations of projectile motions resulting from human throwing) that 81% of a sample of spheroids from the late Acheulean (Bed 3) at the Cave of Hearths, South Africa afford being thrown so as to inflict worthwhile damage to a medium-sized animal over distances up to 25 m. Most of the objects have weights that produce optimal levels of damage from throwing, rather than simply being as heavy as possible (as would suit other functions). Our results show that these objects were eminently suitable for throwing, and demonstrate how empirical research on behavioural tasks can inform and constrain our theories about prehistoric artefacts