Behavioral Cyber Deception: A Game and Prospect Theoretic Approach

This paper aims to characterize deception based attack-defense strategies when a system and an attacker is behavioral in nature under strategic considerations. The paper uses Prospect Theory to model the behavioral nature of the system and the attacker, and Game Theory to model the strategic interactions between them. The paper first considers the availability of multiple computing devices that can be used to deceive a behavioral attacker into attacking a device being unused by a behavioral system and characterizes the Nash Equilibrium (NE) based attack-defense strategy in such a scenario under cost considerations. The paper then considers the problem of protecting a target device that is accessible via a tree network and proposes the idea of deceptive routing to mislead a behavioral attacker towards a fake target present in the network. The NE based attack-defense strategies in the context of the proposed deceptive routing technique is also characterized. Numerical results provide insights into the strategic deception techniques presented in this paper.