A Game Theoretic Framework for Evaluating Resilience of Networks Against Attacks

Designing information and communication systems that are robust and resilient to attacks has been and continues to be an important and challenging topic. One of the main difficulties resides in quantifying the vulnerability/robustness of a system in the presence of an intelligent attacker who might exploit the structure of the system to design harmful attacks. To capture the strategic nature of the interactions between a defender and an adversary, game theoretic models have been gaining a lot of interest in the study of the security of information and communication systems.

In this talk, I will introduce the notion of network blocking games and discuss how it can be used to design a framework for analyzing robustness/vulnerability of information systems in adversarial environment. A network blocking game takes as input the communication model and the topology of a network and models the strategic interactions between an adversary and the network operator as a two-player game. The Nash equilibrium strategies are then used to predict the most likely attacker’s actions and the attacker’s Nash equilibrium payoff serves as a quantification of the vulnerability of the network.

I will discuss the notion of network blocking games and show how they can be used to derive network vulnerability metrics by using a series of examples of communication models. I will also show how these metrics can be used to design networks that are robust against attacks and/or strengthen the robustness of existing networks. I will also show how the metrics can be used to identify the most critical links in a network.

This is joint work with Dr. Vladimir Marbukh (NIST), Aron Lazska (Budapest University of Technology and Economics), Prof. Jean C. Walrand and Prof. Venkat Anantharam (UC Berkeley),

Speaker Bio: Assane Gueye is a NIST-ARRA postdoctoral researcher in the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He received his Ph.D. in Communication Engineering (March 2011) from the EECS department at the University of California, Berkeley and his MSE (September 2004) in Communication Systems from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Assane’s current research is on the application of game theoretic models to communication and cyber security. His past research includes bottleneck identification in complex network, performance evaluation of wireless cellular networks and sensor network deployment in unknown environment. Assane is currently working in joint collaboration with NIST and the University of Maryland in College Park.

Presentation Slides: PPT

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