Redundancy vs. Protection vs. False Targets for Systems Under Attack

A system consists of identical elements. The cumulative performance of these elements should meet a demand. The defender applies different actions to reduce a damage associated with system performance reduction below the demand that is caused by an external attack. There are three types of the defensive actions: providing system redundancy (deploying genuine system elements (GE) with cumulative performance exceeding the demand), deploying false elements (FE), and protecting the GE. The defender tries to allocate its total defense resource optimally among the three defensive actions by choosing the total number of GE N, the number of protected GE K , and the number of FE H . The attacker cannot distinguish GE from FE. It chooses the number of elements Q to attack, and attacks Q elements at random distributing its resource evenly among the attacked elements. The model considers a non-cooperative two-period minmax game between the defender and the attacker, and presents an algorithm for determining the optimal agents' strategies.