A Learning-based Honeypot Game for Collaborative Defense in UAV Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic and reinforcement learning-based framework to incentivize UAVs to collaborate in sharing defense data via honeypots, improving cybersecurity in UAV networks.

Contribution

It presents a novel incentive mechanism combining contract theory and reinforcement learning for collaborative defense in UAV networks with private information.

Findings

Enhances UAV collaboration in honeypot defense.

Improves attack detection through incentivized data sharing.

Outperforms existing solutions in simulation results.

Abstract

The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) opens up new opportunities for on-demand service provisioning anywhere and anytime, but it also exposes UAVs to various cyber threats. Low/medium-interaction honeypot is regarded as a promising lightweight defense to actively protect mobile Internet of things, especially UAV networks. Existing works primarily focused on honeypot design and attack pattern recognition, the incentive issue for motivating UAVs' participation (e.g., sharing trapped attack data in honeypots) to collaboratively resist distributed and sophisticated attacks is still under-explored. This paper proposes a novel game-based collaborative defense approach to address optimal, fair, and feasible incentive mechanism design, in the presence of network dynamics and UAVs' multi-dimensional private information (e.g., valid defense data (VDD) volume, communication delay, and UAV cost). Specifically, we first develop a honeypot game between UAVs under both partial and complete information asymmetry scenarios. We then devise a contract-theoretic method to solve the optimal VDD-reward contract design problem with partial information asymmetry, while ensuring truthfulness, fairness, and computational efficiency. Furthermore, under complete information asymmetry, we devise a reinforcement learning based distributed method to dynamically design optimal contracts for distinct types of UAVs in the fast-changing network. Experimental simulations show that the proposed scheme can motivate UAV's collaboration in VDD sharing and enhance defensive effectiveness, compared with existing solutions.