Foundations of Cyber Resilience: The Confluence of Game, Control, and Learning Theories

TL;DR

This paper explores the integration of game theory, control theory, and learning theories to establish a systematic, quantitative foundation for designing and analyzing cyber resilience mechanisms against evolving cyber threats.

Contribution

It introduces a unified theoretical framework combining game, control, and learning theories for cyber resilience, advancing the understanding of strategic, adaptive, and data-driven defense mechanisms.

Findings

Development of dynamic asymmetric game models

Application of moving horizon control for adaptive responses

Use of conjectural and meta-learning for proactive threat reasoning

Abstract

Cyber resilience is a complementary concept to cybersecurity, focusing on the preparation, response, and recovery from cyber threats that are challenging to prevent. Organizations increasingly face such threats in an evolving cyber threat landscape. Understanding and establishing foundations for cyber resilience provide a quantitative and systematic approach to cyber risk assessment, mitigation policy evaluation, and risk-informed defense design. A systems-scientific view toward cyber risks provides holistic and system-level solutions. This chapter starts with a systemic view toward cyber risks and presents the confluence of game theory, control theory, and learning theories, which are three major pillars for the design of cyber resilience mechanisms to counteract increasingly sophisticated and evolving threats in our networks and organizations. Game and control theoretic methods provide a set of modeling frameworks to capture the strategic and dynamic interactions between defenders and attackers. Control and learning frameworks together provide a feedback-driven mechanism that enables autonomous and adaptive responses to threats. Game and learning frameworks offer a data-driven approach to proactively reason about adversarial behaviors and resilient strategies. The confluence of the three lays the theoretical foundations for the analysis and design of cyber resilience. This chapter presents various theoretical paradigms, including dynamic asymmetric games, moving horizon control, conjectural learning, and meta-learning, as recent advances at the intersection. This chapter concludes with future directions and discussions of the role of neurosymbolic learning and the synergy between foundation models and game models in cyber resilience.