Decoy Allocation Games on Graphs with Temporal Logic Objectives

Abstract

We study a class of games, in which the adversary (attacker) is to satisfy a complex mission specified in linear temporal logic, and the defender is to prevent the adversary from achieving its goal. A deceptive defender can allocate decoys, in addition to defense actions, to create disinformation for the attacker. Thus, we focus on the problem of jointly synthesizing a decoy placement strategy and a deceptive defense strategy that maximally exploits the incomplete information the attacker about the decoy locations. We introduce a model of hypergames on graphs with temporal logic objectives to capture such adversarial interactions with asymmetric information. Using the hypergame model, we analyze the effectiveness of a given decoy placement, quantified by the set of deceptive winning states where the defender can prevent the attacker from satisfying the attack objective given its incomplete information about decoy locations. Then, we investigate how to place decoys to maximize the defender's deceptive winning region. Considering the large search space for all possible decoy allocation strategies, we incorporate the idea of compositional synthesis from formal methods and show that the objective function in the class of decoy allocation problem is monotone and nondecreasing. We derive the sufficient conditions under which the objective function for the decoy allocation problem is submodular, or supermodular, respectively. We show a sub-optimal allocation can be efficiently computed by iteratively composing the solutions of hypergames with a subset of decoys and the solution of a hypergame given a single decoy. We use a running example to illustrate the proposed method.