Game Theory with Learning for Cyber Security Monitoring

Abstract

Recent attacks show that threats to cyber infrastructure are not only increasing in volume, but are getting more sophisticated. The attacks may comprise multiple actions that are hard to differentiate from benign activity, and therefore common detection techniques have to deal with high false positive rates. Because of the imperfect performance of automated detection techniques, responses to such attacks are highly dependent on human-driven decision-making processes. While game theory has been applied to many problems that require rational decisionmaking, we find limitation on applying such method on security games when the defender has limited information about the opponent's strategies and payoffs. In this work, we propose Q-Learning to react automatically to the adversarial behavior of a suspicious user to secure the system. This work compares variations of Q-Learning with a traditional stochastic game. Simulation results show the possibility of Naive Q-Learning, despite restricted information on opponents.