Surviving in Cyberspace: A Game Theoretic Approach

Abstract

As information systems become ever more complex and the interdependence of these systems increases, a mission-critical system should have the fight-through ability to sustain damage yet survive with mission assurance in cyberspace. To satisfy this requirement, in this paper we propose a game theoretic approach to binary voting with a weighted majority to aggregate observations among replicated nodes. Nodes are of two types: they either vote truthfully or are malicious and thus lie. Voting is strategically performed based on a node s belief about the percentage of compromised nodes in the system. Voting is cast as a stage game model that is a Bayesian Zero-sum game. In the resulting Bayesian Nash equilibrium, if more than a critical proportion of nodes are compromised, their collective decision is only 50% reliable; therefore, no information is obtained from voting. We overcome this by formalizing a repeated game model that guarantees a highly reliable decision process even though nearly all nodes are compromised. A survival analysis is performed to derive the total time of mission survival for both a one-shot game and the repeated game. Mathematical proofs and simulations support our model.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA568214

Entities

People

  • Charles Alexander kenmogne kamhoua
  • Joon S. Park
  • Kevin A. Kwiat

Organizations

  • Air Force Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Algorithms
  • Computer Network Security
  • Cyberspace
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Game Theory
  • Governments
  • Hidden Markov Models
  • Information Systems
  • Mathematical Models
  • Networks
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Simulations
  • Survival

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Cybersecurity.
  • Game Theory.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Bayesian Inference
  • Cyber
  • Cyber - Cryptography