Game-based Simulation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack and Defense Mechanisms of Critical Infrastructures

Abstract

The outage of Critical Infrastructures (CI) can have devastating impacts on our society, economic welfare and political stability. One risk that is often encountered in critical infrastructure sectors is its high dependence on ICT components and the complex interdependencies between shared services. Recent cyber attacks (such as Stuxnet, Flame, Gauss) outline the high vulnerability of ICT components which build the foundation of today's Critical Infrastructures. The complexity and fast-changing threat environment pose an enormous challenge for estimating and forecasting the impacts of cyber attacks on such systems. In order to address this challenge, modeling and simulation techniques are used. Especially, Agent-based Modeling and Simulation provides a powerful technique to represent dynamic behavior of various actors. In this paper, we introduce a concept to model and simulate Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) on critical infrastructures. For representing the interactions and the underlying decisions of the individual agents, we decided to combine Agent-based Modeling and Simulation with game-theoretic elements (such as Anticipation Games). In course of the paper we provide a short motivational example to outline how our approach can be applied in a real world scenario. Furthermore, the architecture of our research prototype is given.