Topology of Covert Conflict

Abstract

Often an attacker tries to disconnect a network by destroying nodes or edges, while the defender counters using various resilience mechanisms. Examples include a music industry body attempting to close down a peer-to-peer file-sharing network; medics attempting to halt the spread of an infectious disease by selective vaccination; and a police agency trying to decapitate a terrorist organisation. Albert, Jeong and Barabási famously analysed the static case, and showed that vertex -order attacks are effective against scale-free networks. We extend this work to the dynamic case by developing a framework based on evolutionary game theory to explore the interaction of attack and defence strategies. We show, first, that naive defences don't work against vertex-order attack; second, that defences based on simple redundancy don't work much better, but that defences based on cliques work well; third, that attacks based on centrality work better against clique defences than vertex-order attacks do; and fourth, that defences based on complex strategies such as delegation plus clique resist centrality attacks better than simple clique defences. Our models thus build a bridge between network analysis and evolutionary game theory, and provide a framework for analysing defence and attack in networks where topology matters. They suggest definitions of efficiency of attack and defence, and may even explain the evolution of insurgent organisations from networks of cells to a more virtual leadership that facilitates operations rather than directing them. Finally, we draw some conclusions and present possible directions for future research.

Information Security Economics - and Beyond

“…Nagaraja and Anderson extend this to the dynamic case. In their model, the attacker can remove a certain number of nodes at each round, after which the defenders recruit other nodes to replace them [97]. They studied how attack and defence interact using multi-round simulations, and found that forming localised clique structures at key network points works reasonably well while defences based on rings did not work well at all.…”

Insurance mechanisms in information security risk management

“…We are not aware of literature using scale-free topologies to model interdependent security or correlated risk in cyber-insurance, although this family of graphs is wellestablished in the areas of reliability modeling and distributed defense for its good fit with real-world networks [AJB00,NA06].…”

Connected Colors: Unveiling the Structure of Criminal Networks

“…al. [25] used game theory and network analysis to suggest effective attacks and defenses against networks and network connectivity. BotGrep [26] identifies botnet communities using random walks to detect dense community structures.…”