Game Theoretic Approaches to Protect Cyberspace

摘要

The area of cyberspace defense mechanism design has received immense attention from the research community for more than two decades. However, the cyberspace security problem is far from completely solved. In this project we explored the applicability of game theoretic approaches to address some of the challenging cyber security issues: (a) We built a state-of-the-art attack taxonomy which can provide the system administrator with information on how to mitigate or remediate an attack, (b) We conducted a thorough survey of the existing game-theoretic solutions to cyber security problems and proposed a detailed taxonomy, which points out that this area requires more attention from the research community, (c) We proposed stochastic game models for generic cyber activities (attacks and defenses), which eliminate the unrealistic assumptions of the existing models. We validated the effectiveness of our model via extensive simulation, (d) We modeled the interaction between a class of attacks (such as the Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)) and the possible countermeasures as a two-player general-sum game. We validated our analytical results via simulation experiments, (c) We compiled a set of metrics which can evaluate the cost and benefit of a game-theoretic defense solution. In addition, we have proposed a Game Theory Inspired Defense Architecture (GIDA).