Security from the adversary's inertia-controlling convergence speed when playing mixed strategy equilibria
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: Security from the adversary's inertia-controlling convergence speed when playing mixed strategy equilibria
zbMATH Open document ID: 1418.91035
author: Jasmin Wachter
author: Stefan Rass
author: Sandra König
published in: Games
publication date: 2018-12-10T00:00:00Z
review text: Summary: Game-theoretic models are a convenient tool to systematically analyze competitive situations. This makes them particularly handy in the field of security where a company or a critical infrastructure wants to defend against an attacker. When the optimal solution of the security game involves several pure strategies (i.e., the equilibrium is mixed), this may induce additional costs. Minimizing these costs can be done simultaneously with the original goal of minimizing the damage due to the attack. Existing models assume that the attacker instantly knows the action chosen by the defender (i.e., the pure strategy he is playing in the \(i\)-th round) but in real situations this may take some time. Such adversarial inertia can be exploited to gain security and save cost. To this end, we introduce the concept of \textit{information delay}, which is defined as the time it takes an attacker to mount an attack. In this period it is assumed that the adversary has no information about the present state of the system, but only knows the last state before commencing the attack. Based on a Markov chain model we construct strategy policies that are cheaper in terms of maintenance (switching costs) when compared to classical approaches. The proposed approach yields slightly larger security risk but overall ensures a better performance. Furthermore, by reinvesting the saved costs in additional security measures it is possible to obtain even more security at the same overall cost.
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 91A10
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 91A05
zbMATH DE Number: 6991173
zbMATH Keywords: game theory
zbMATH Keywords: stochastic control
zbMATH Keywords: mixed strategy equilibrium
zbMATH Keywords: control of expenses
zbMATH Keywords: switching costs
zbMATH Keywords: incomplete information
zbMATH Keywords: bounded rationality
zbMATH Keywords: information delay
zbMATH Keywords: Perron-Frobenius
MaRDI profile type: Publication
full work available at URL: g9030059
OpenAlex ID: W2888657370
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Wikidata QID: Q129362670
DOI: 10.3390/G9030059
description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 6991173