Game Theoretic Approaches to Cyber Security: Challenges, Results, and Open Problems

Abstract

We formulate cyber security problems with many strategic attackers and defenders as stochastic dynamic games with asymmetric information. We discuss solution approaches to stochastic dynamic games with asymmetric information and identify the difficulties/challenges associated with these approaches. We present a solution methodology for stochastic dynamic games with asymmetric information that resolves some of these difficulties. Our main results are based on certain key assumptions about the game model. Therefore, our methodology can solve only specific classes of cyber security problems. We identify classes of cyber security problems that our methodology cannot solve and connect these problems to open problems in game theory.