Game Theoretical Analysis of the Acceptance of Global Trust Management for Unwanted Traffic Control

In the past decade, the Internet has witnessed an incredible growth in its pervasive use. People are enjoying unprecedented convenience brought by the Internet boom. However, an increasing amount of unwanted traffic, such as spam and malware, severely burdens both users and Internet service providers (ISPs), which arouses wide public concern. A Global Trust Management (GTM) system was proposed and demonstrated to be accurate, robust and effective on unwanted traffic control in our previous work [8, 23]. But its acceptance by network entities (ISPs and hosts) is crucial to its practical deployment and final success. In this paper, we investigate the acceptance conditions of the GTM system using Game Theory. Considering the selfish nature of network entities, we address our problem as a social dilemma. To enhance cooperation among network entities, a Public Goods based GTM game is formulated with a trust-based punishment mechanism. We show that our mechanism can provide the incentives of behaving cooperatively for network entities. Meanwhile, the conditions of the adoption of GTM system are carried out. Furthermore, suggestions for ISPs cooperating with antivirus vendors are put forward.

I. Introduction

The Internet has witnessed an incredible growth in its pervasive use. People are enjoying unprecedented convenience brought by the Internet boom. However, at the same time when Internet users benefit from the Internet based services, they are more and more troubled by the increasing amount of unwanted traffic, such as spam, malware, vicious intrusions, and so on. For example, spam accounts for 14.5 billion messages globally per day, i.e., it makes up 45% of all emails [3]. According to South Korea's National Police Agency, the computer networks of three major South Korea banks and three television networks went offline almost simultaneously at 2pm Seoul time on 20^th March 2013, caused by a malware attack [1]. The websites and corporate networks at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup suffered from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks both in 2011 and 2012, resulting in hundreds of complaints from their customers [2]. Such incidents undoubtedly increase public worries on network security. Thus, working out an efficient solution to control the unwanted traffic in the Internet has become a crucial task that brooks no delay.