Learning to Signal in the Goldilocks Zone: Improving Adversary Compliance in Security Games

Many real-world security scenarios can be modeled via a game-theoretic framework known as a security game in which there is a defender trying to protect potential targets from an attacker. Recent work in security games has shown that deceptive signaling by the defender can convince an attacker to withdraw his attack. For instance, a warning message to commuters indicating speed enforcement is in progress ahead might lead to them driving more slowly, even if it turns out no enforcement is in progress. However, the results of this work are limited by the unrealistic assumption that the attackers will behave with perfect rationality, meaning they always choose an action that gives them the best expected reward. We address the problem of training boundedly rational (human) attackers to comply with signals via repeated interaction with signaling without incurring a loss to the defender, and offer the four following contributions: (i) We learn new decision tree and neural network-based models of attacker compliance with signaling. (ii) Based on these machine learning models of a boundedly rational attacker’s response to signaling, we develop a theory of signaling in the Goldilocks zone, a balance of signaling and deception that increases attacker compliance and improves defender utility. (iii) We present game-theoretic algorithms to solve for signaling schemes based on the learned models of attacker compliance with signaling. (iv) We conduct extensive human subject experiments using an online game. The game simulates the scenario of an inside attacker trying to steal sensitive information from company computers, and results show that our algorithms based on learned models of attacker behavior lead to better attacker compliance and improved defender utility compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm for rational attackers with signaling.