Strategic Cyber Reasoning in Attacker-Defender Resource Allocation Games

Resource allocation games provide a natural environment in which to explore the strategic aspects of cyber security. Computer systems at risk in the financial, industrial, military, and private sectors are becoming increasingly complex, consisting of multiple components and exhibiting a variety of attack surfaces or vulnerabilities. In either attacking or defending on these “battlefields”, resources might be given and limited or determined by the players’ choices. In the proposed research, we develop extensions of the popular Colonel Blotto game with application in cyber security attacker and defender strategic reasoning experimentally. The project is expected to provide defenders with some basic principles for allocating security costs across various components of a system when defending against anonymous attackers. Furthermore, based on the experimental results, we intend to construct an equilibrium-­‐like solution concept, which takes into account that players use categorical thinking or multi-­‐dimensional reasoning. The solution concept is expected to be   particularly useful for predicting behavior in situations of repeated interaction between a particular defender and attacker, where both players become more sophisticated over time and learn from their opponent’s previous actions, although they are subject to certain cognitive or computational limitations.