Defending a series system with individual protection, overarching protection, and disinformation

Abstract

This research addresses the use of individual protection, overarching protection, and disinformation to defend a series system against intentional attacks. The attacker can allocate resources to intelligence actions to distinguish false targets from genuine targets. Analogously, the defender can expend efforts on disinformation actions to prevent the false targets from being detected. The probability that a target is detected depends on the effort exerted by both parties. In this defense and attack model, the defender moves first and allocates its resources to overarching protection, disinformation actions, and individual protection to minimize system destruction probability, assuming that the attacker has full knowledge of its actions and will always employ the most harmful attack strategy. The attacker allocates its resources to overarching protection penetration, intelligence actions, and individual attacks to maximize system destruction probability. We formulate the defense and attack model as a two-stage minmax game and analyze the optimal defense strategy. The proposed model is illustrated by a signaling system. This study demonstrates how the defender and attacker should respond under different contest intensities and amounts of resources.