A Game Theoretical Method for Cost-Benefit Analysis of Malware Dissemination Prevention

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Literature in malware proliferation focuses on modeling and analyzing its spread dynamics. Epidemiology models, which are inspired by the characteristics of biological disease spread in human populations, have been used against this threat to analyze the way malware spreads in a network. This work presents a modified version of the commonly used epidemiology models Susceptible Infected Recovered (SIR) and Susceptible Infected Susceptible (SIS), which incorporates the ability to capture the relationships between nodes within a network, along with their effect on malware dissemination process. Drawing upon a model that illustrates the network’s behavior based on the attacker’s and the defender’s choices, we use game theory to compute optimal strategies for the defender to minimize the effect of malware spread, at the same time minimizing the security cost. We consider three defense mechanisms: patch, removal, and patch and removal, which correspond to the defender’s strategy and use probabilistically with a certain rate. The attacker chooses the type of attack according to its effectiveness and cost. Through the interaction between the two opponents we infer the optimal strategy for both players, known as Nash Equilibrium, evaluating the related payoffs. Hence, our model provides a cost-benefit risk management framework for managing malware spread in computer networks

Managing Cyber Security Risks in Industrial Control Systems with Game Theory and Viable System Modelling

Cyber security risk management in Industrial Control Systems has been a challenging problem for both practitioners and the research community. Their proprietary nature along with the complexity of those systems renders traditional approaches rather insufficient and creating the need for the adoption of a holistic point of view. This paper draws upon the principles of the Viable System Model and Game Theory in order to present a novel systemic approach towards cyber security management in this field, taking into account the complex inter-dependencies and providing cost-efficient defence solutions

Application of a Game Theoretic Approach in Smart Sensor Data Trustworthiness Problems

In this work we present an Intrusion Detection (ID) and an Intrusion Prevention (IP) model for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The attacker’s goal is to compromise the deployment by causing nodes to report faulty sensory information. The defender, who is the WSN’s operator, aims to detect the presence of faulty sensor measurements (ID) and to subsequently recover compromised nodes (IP). In order to address the conflicting interests involved, we adopt a Game Theoretic approach that takes into consideration the strategies of both players and we attempt to identify the presence of Nash Equilibria in the two games. The results are then verified in two simulation contexts: Firstly, we evaluate the model in a middleware-based WSN which uses clustering over a bespoke network stack. Subsequently, we test the model in a simulated IPv6-based sensor deployment. According to the findings, the results of both simulation models confirm the results of the theoretic one