Stealthy attacks and observable defenses: A game theoretic model under strict resource constraints

Abstract

Stealthy attacks are a major threat to cyber security. In practice, both attackers and defenders have resource constraints that could limit their capabilities. Hence, to develop robust defense strategies, a promising approach is to utilize game theory to understand the fundamental tradeoffs involved. Previous works in this direction, however, mainly focus on the single-node case without considering strict resource constraints. In this paper, a game-theoretic model for protecting a system of multiple nodes against stealthy attacks is proposed. We consider the practical setting where the frequencies of both the attack and the defense are constrained by limited resources, and an asymmetric feedback structure where the attacker can fully observe the states of nodes while largely hiding its actions from the defender. We characterize best strategies for both the defender and the attacker, and study the Nash Equilibria of the game.