Time-Dependent Strategies in Games of Timing

Timing, a central aspect of decision-making in security scenarios, is a subject of growing academic interest; frequently in the context of stealthy attacks, or advanced persistent threats (APTs). A key model in this research landscape is FlipIt [1]. However, a limiting simplifying assumption in the FlipIt literature is that costs and gains are not subject to discounting, which contradicts the typical treatment of decision-making over time in most economically relevant contexts.

[1]  Jens Grossklags,et al.  When to Invest in Security? Empirical Evidence and a Game-Theoretic Approach for Time-Based Security , 2017, ArXiv.

[2]  Aron Laszka,et al.  Mitigation of Targeted and Non-targeted Covert Attacks as a Timing Game , 2013, GameSec.

[3]  Ming Zhang,et al.  A Game Theoretic Model for Defending Against Stealthy Attacks with Limited Resources , 2015, GameSec.

[4]  Aron Laszka,et al.  Games of Timing for Security in Dynamic Environments , 2015, GameSec.

[5]  Prasant Mohapatra,et al.  Dynamic defense strategy against advanced persistent threat with insiders , 2015, 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM).

[6]  Quanyan Zhu,et al.  Flip the Cloud: Cyber-Physical Signaling Games in the Presence of Advanced Persistent Threats , 2015, GameSec.

[7]  Tom Holvoet,et al.  Exponential discounting in security games of timing , 2021, J. Cybersecur..

[8]  Stefan Rass,et al.  Defending Against Advanced Persistent Threats Using Game-Theory , 2017, PloS one.

[9]  Tadeusz Radzik RESULTS AND PROBLEMS IN GAMES OF TIMING , 1996 .

[10]  Nigel P. Smart,et al.  Threshold FlipThem: When the Winner Does Not Need to Take All , 2015, GameSec.

[11]  Gábor Horváth,et al.  FlipThem: Modeling Targeted Attacks with FlipIt for Multiple Resources , 2014, GameSec.

[12]  Ronald L. Rivest,et al.  FlipIt: The Game of “Stealthy Takeover” , 2012, Journal of Cryptology.

[13]  Ronald L. Rivest,et al.  Defending against the Unknown Enemy: Applying FlipIt to System Security , 2012, GameSec.

[14]  Aron Laszka,et al.  Mitigating Covert Compromises - A Game-Theoretic Model of Targeted and Non-Targeted Covert Attacks , 2013, WINE.

[15]  Carlos Cid,et al.  Are We Compromised? Modelling Security Assessment Games , 2012, GameSec.

[16]  Jens Grossklags,et al.  FlipLeakage: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Protect Against Stealthy Attackers in the Presence of Information Leakage , 2016, GameSec.

[17]  Prasant Mohapatra,et al.  Stealthy attacks meets insider threats: A three-player game model , 2015, MILCOM 2015 - 2015 IEEE Military Communications Conference.