The Cyber Alliance Game: How Alliances Influence Cyber-Warfare

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic model to analyze how alliances influence cyber-warfare strategies, focusing on vulnerability sharing, internal power dynamics, and alliance incentives in cyber conflicts.

Contribution

It presents a novel Cyber Alliance Game framework that examines alliance effects on cyber conflict decisions, including sharing incentives and internal power structures.

Findings

Vulnerability-sharing rewards significantly affect equilibrium outcomes.

Internal power structures influence member behavior and conflict results.

Alliances can steer member actions through rewards and punishments.

Abstract

Cyber-warfare has become the norm in current ongoing military conflicts. Over the past decade, numerous examples have shown the extent to which nation-states become vulnerable if they do not focus on building their cyber capacities. Adding to the inherent complexity of cyberwar scenarios, a state is usually a member of one or more alliances. Alliance policies and internal struggles could shape the individual actions of member states; intuitively, this also holds for the cyber domain. In this paper, we define and study a simple Cyber Alliance Game with the objective of understanding the fundamental influence of alliances on cyber conflicts between nation-states. Specifically, we focus on the decision of whether to exploit a newly found vulnerability individually or share it with the alliance. First, we characterize the impact of vulnerability-sharing rewards on the resulting equilibrium. Second, we study the implications of the internal power structure of alliances on cyberwar outcomes and infer the expected behavior of Dictator, Veto, and Dummy players. Finally, we investigate how alliances can nudge their members via rewards and punishments to adhere to their defensive or offensive cyber policy. We believe that our results contribute to the fundamental understanding of real-world cyber-conflicts by characterizing the impact of alliances.