How Shall We Play a Game?

>Abstract—Automated techniques and tools for finding, exploiting

and patching vulnerabilities are maturing. In order

to achieve an end goal such as winning a cyber-battle, these

techniques and tools must be wielded strategically. Currently,

strategy development in cyber – even with automated tools –

is done manually, and is a bottleneck in practice. In this paper,

we apply game theory toward the augmentation of the human

decision-making process.

Our work makes two novel contributions. First, previous work

is limited by strong assumptions regarding the number of actors,

actions, and choices in cyber-warfare. We develop a novel model

of cyber-warfare that is more comprehensive than previous work,

removing these limitations in the process. Second, we present an

algorithm for calculating the optimal strategy of the players in

our model. We show that our model is capable of finding better

solutions than previous work within seconds, making computertime

strategic reasoning a reality. We also provide new insights,

compared to previous models, on the impact of optimal strategies.

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~youzhib/paper/bao2017csf.pdf