Double intelligence contests vs. impact contest in defending genuine object with imperfect false targets

Abstract

Deploying false targets is an effective measure to increase the survivability of genuine object when it encounters intentional attacks. Existing researches have mainly assumed that the false target is perfect or can be detected with a constant detection probability. In this paper, it is assumed that both genuine object and false target are possible to be detected. The detection probability of the genuine object/false target depends on the attacker's intelligence effort and the defender's disinformation effort. A game between the defender and the attacker with constrained resource is modeled, which can be divided into the intelligence contest on genuine object, intelligence contest on false targets and the impact contest. The system survivability is modeled as a function of the defender and the attacker's strategies. As a beginning, numerical analysis is implemented to study the optimal attack strategy as functions of the defense strategy.