Title: An initiative network defence strategy based on game theory

Authors: Qiang Zhao; Jun Dong

Addresses: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Baoding University, Baoding, Hebei, 071000, China ' Hebei Vocational Art College, Shijiazhuang 050011, China

Abstract: Traditional network safety evaluation only takes into account the attackers' measures to system threat and it lacks initiative defence strategies. To provide an overall and comprehensive analysis on security status of the network, this paper proposes an initiative network system defence strategy based on game theory. The scheme considers possible attack strategies and defence strategies to establish game strategy graph according to the dependency relationship among host vulnerabilities of network. Further, it puts forward a attack-defence game model with double roles and non-cooperation, defining payoff function on both sides. Then the model designs corresponding defence strategy search algorithm to provide a novel method to reflect real-time and scientific security situation evaluation intuitively. It computes the benefits of both sides to find a balance point and provides the optimal defence measure of defenders. The simulation results show that our strategy is more in line with the actual situation than traditional methods with unilateral evaluation on single side. The model can also rapidly respond to network system and it is feasible to improve the network security defence status.

Keywords: initiative defence strategy; game theory; defence graph; payoff; Nash equilibrium.

DOI: 10.1504/IJADS.2018.090931

International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences, 2018 Vol.11 No.2, pp.195 - 209

Received: 14 Jun 2017
Accepted: 14 Oct 2017
Published online: 03 Apr 2018 *

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