A Dynamic Game Analysis and Design of Infrastructure Network Protection and Recovery

TL;DR

This paper models infrastructure network protection and recovery as a dynamic game between a defender and attacker, deriving optimal strategies and analyzing system resilience through a case study.

Contribution

It introduces a three-stage game framework for infrastructure security, explicitly characterizes subgame perfect equilibrium strategies, and applies the model to UAV communication networks.

Findings

Explicit SPE strategies depend on system parameters

Defense strategies effectively maintain network connectivity

Attacker's optimal link removal strategies are identified

Abstract

Infrastructure networks are vulnerable to both cyber and physical attacks. Building a secure and resilient networked system is essential for providing reliable and dependable services. To this end, we establish a two-player three-stage game framework to capture the dynamics in the infrastructure protection and recovery phases. Specifically, the goal of the infrastructure network designer is to keep the network connected before and after the attack, while the adversary aims to disconnect the network by compromising a set of links. With costs for creating and removing links, the two players aim to maximize their utilities while minimizing the costs. In this paper, we use the concept of subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) to characterize the optimal strategies of the network defender and attacker. We derive the SPE explicitly in terms of system parameters. Finally, we use a case study of UAV-enabled communication networks for disaster recovery to corroborate the obtained analytical results.