Chapman, Martin David

This thesis proposes to model a network attack as a game of hide-and-seek between anattacker and a defender. In the game of hide-and-seek, one player, the hider, conceals aset of objects on the nodes of a network, and a seeker must locate them by taking intoaccount how the hider has concealed them. In a network attack, an attacker regularlyleverages a subset of hosts in a legitimate network (e.g. creating bots in a peer-to-peer(P2P) network) to work on their behalf in order to attack a network. These nodes mustbe found, and blocked, if a defender is to protect their network. In both these cases, thetask of the seeker and the task of the defender are the same: to not only search the graph,but to also understand how the opponent has actively concealed the objects sought. Aseeker and a defender can therefore be considered interchangeably. Under this framing,the seeker is a benign entity, but the versatility of the hide-and-seek model also allows usto consider the case in which a seeker is an attacker (e.g. an intruder in a network). Inboth cases, solutions for the hide-and-seek game can provide recommendations for howa defender should act in order to protect their network.However, current hide-and-seek game models avoid incorporating parameters that mayincrease the complexity of the game. We argue that these same parameters – an arbitrarynetwork topology, and multiple player interactions, among others – must be included inorder to accurately capture the dynamics of a network attack. We therefore presenta new hide-and-seek game model, which is designed to include these parameters. Wedefine this model conceptually, before using it to implement a simulation platform. Thisplatform supports both the development of strategies, and an estimation of their payoffs.Using these estimations, we are able to solve the game of hide-and-seek, under variousconfigurations, and thus provide the aforementioned recommendations for how to playthe game and how to act during, or in preparation for, a network attack

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Cyber Hide-and-Seek

https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/65641336/2016_Chapman_Martin_David_1156145_ethesis.pdf

Cyber Hide-and-Seek

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