Beyond the Prisoner’s Dilemma: the Social Dilemmas of Cybersecurity

Abstract

The Prisoner’s Dilemma represents an ubiquitous approach to security modeling that emphasizes adversarial relationships between actors. Adopting this approach helps understand ambiguous relationships in information domains. Despite the fact that some actors might adopt these frames, the Prisoner’s Dilemma reflects only one of many possible social dilemmas. In this paper, we outline a computational approach to cybersecurity based on Interdependence Theory. Interdependence Theory provides a means to decompose payoff matrices into social influence components based on the amount of control actors and partners have in a situation. It additionally accounts for joint control that develops from the mutual decisions of both players. By focusing on two-person, two-option games, this approach can model many different social situations that reflect nor-mal and anomalous network activity.