A Supervisory Control Approach to Dynamic Cyber-Security

An analytical approach for a dynamic cyber-security problem that captures progressive attacks to a computer network is presented. We formulate the dynamic security problem from the defender’s point of view as a supervisory control problem with imperfect information, modeling the computer network’s operation by a discrete event system. We consider a min-max performance criterion and use dynamic programming to determine, within a restricted set of policies, an optimal policy for the defender. We study and interpret the behavior of this optimal policy as we vary certain parameters of the supervisory control problem.

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