A Game Theoretic Approach to Decision and Analysis in Strategies of Attack and Defense

The interactive behavior between the hacker and the defender is similar to information warfare. The process of attack and defend can be abstracted as a tree diagram and analyzed based on game theory. When a hacker launches an attack, he must do his best to get expected payoff. Similarly the defender may hope to protect system against attacker successfully by minimizing security investment. The tradeoff between attack and defense is hard to keep accurately by means of traditional experience rule. In this paper, we try to solve the problem quickly with the help of game theory. A simple and effective way based on the minimax theorem in game theory is presented. In zero-sum games, the minimax solution is the same as the Nash equilibrium. Thus those strategies listed in probability spread can satisfy both involvers. The result accords with the real scenario in common network environment.