# A Dynamic Game Approach to Strategic Design of Secure and Resilient Infrastructure Network

## TL;DR

This paper models the strategic interaction between network defenders and attackers in infrastructure systems using a dynamic game framework, deriving optimal strategies and analyzing resilience in UAV communication networks.

## Contribution

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

## Key findings

- Explicit equilibrium strategies derived
- Resilience planning insights obtained
- Strategic attack timing analyzed

## 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. We further investigate the resilience planning of the defender and the strategic timing of attack of the adversary. Finally, we use case studies of UAV-enabled communication networks for disaster recovery to corroborate the obtained analytical results.