A game theoretic model for enabling honeypots in IoT networks

Honeypots have been considered as one of the methods to ensure security for networks in the Internet of Things (IoT) realm. In this paper, we study the problem of defending against attacks in honeypot-enabled networks by looking at a game-theoretic model of deception involving an attacker and a defender. The attacker may try to deceive the defender by employing different types of attacks ranging from a suspicious to a seemingly normal activity, while the defender in turn can make use of honeypots as a tool of deception to trap attackers. The problem is modeled as a Bayesian game of incomplete information, where equilibria are identified for both the one-shot game and the repeated game versions. Our results showed that there is a threshold for the frequency of active attackers, above which both players will take deceptive actions and below which the defender can mix up his/her strategy while keeping the attackers success rate low.