A Game-Theoretic Approach to Stochastic Security and Dependability Evaluation

Abstract

The complex networked computer systems of today are often vulnerable to a large number of failures, accidental as well as intentional. To be able to assess to what degree one can rely on such a system, new methods for quantitative evaluation is needed. This paper presents a stochastic model for integrated security and dependability evaluation, which models malicious attacker behavior as transitions between system states. To predict the probabilities of attack actions a game theoretic approach is applied. We demonstrate the method by computing security and dependability measures in two different case studies.

Of Threats and Costs: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Security Risk Management

“…Numerical studies lead to some mixed Nash equilibria, i.e., at some state(s) players should choose their action according to a given probability distribution. [25,29] apply stochastic game models as well, to study other specific attack scenarios, and numerically compute mixed Nash strategies. The Bayesian approach is also considered in security games, for example in [23].…”