A Hypergame‐Based Defense Strategy Toward Cyber Deception in Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT)

In this chapter, we develop a defense strategy to secure Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) based on a hypergame employing deceptive techniques. The hypergame is played multiple rounds. At each round, the adversary updates its perception of the attack graph and chooses the next node to compromise. The defender updates its perceived list of compromised nodes and actively feeds false signals to the adversary to create deception. The hypergame developed in this chapter provides an important theoretical framework for us to model how a cyberattack spreads on a network and the interaction between the adversary and the defender. It also provides quantitative metrics such as the time it takes the adversary to explore the network and compromise the target nodes. Based on these metrics, the defender can reboot the network devices and reset the network topology in time to clean up all potentially compromised devices and to protect the critical nodes. The hypergame provides useful guidance on how to create cyber deceptions so that the adversary cannot obtain information about the correct network topology and can be deterred from reaching the target critical nodes on a military network while it is in service.