Game Theory in Distributed Systems Security: Foundations, Challenges, and Future Directions

TL;DR

This paper advocates for integrating game theory into distributed systems security, outlining foundational concepts, research challenges, and future directions to enhance security against increasing threats.

Contribution

It establishes foundational links between game theory and distributed system security and identifies key research challenges for short and long-term progress.

Findings

Framework for applying game theory to security challenges

Identification of analytical, systems, and integration challenges

Community-driven research agenda for future work

Abstract

Many of our critical infrastructure systems and personal computing systems have a distributed computing systems structure. The incentives to attack them have been growing rapidly as has their attack surface due to increasing levels of connectedness. Therefore, we feel it is time to bring in rigorous reasoning to secure such systems. The distributed system security and the game theory technical communities can come together to effectively address this challenge. In this article, we lay out the foundations from each that we can build upon to achieve our goals. Next, we describe a set of research challenges for the community, organized into three categories -- analytical, systems, and integration challenges, each with "short term" time horizon (2-3 years) and "long term" (5-10 years) items. This article was conceived of through a community discussion at the 2022 NSF SaTC PI meeting.