In this work , we study the problem of allocating limited security countermeasures to protect network data from cyber-attacks, for scenarios modeled by Bayesian attack graphs.
We consider multi-stage interactions between a network administrator and cybercriminals, formulated as a security game.
We propose parameterized heuristic strategies for the attacker and defender and provide detailed analysis of their time complexity.
Our heuristics exploit the topological structure of attack graphs and employ sampling methods to overcome the computational complexity in predicting opponent actions.
Due to the complexity of the game, we employ a simulation-based approach and perform empirical game analysis over an enumerated set of heuristic strategies.
Finally, we conduct experiments in various game settings to evaluate the performance of our heuristics in defending networks, in a manner that is robust to uncertainty about the security environment.
Nguyen, T. H., Wright, M., Wellman, M. P., & Singh, S. (2017). Multi-stage attack graph security games: Heuristic strategies, with empirical game-theoretic analysis. In MTD 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Moving Target Defense, co-located with CCS 2017 (Vol. 2017-January, pp. 87-97). Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1145/3140549.3140562
