Zero-determinant Strategy for Moving Target Defense: Existence, Performance, and Computation

TL;DR

This paper introduces zero-determinant strategies for moving target defense, offering a computationally efficient alternative to Stackelberg equilibrium with comparable performance in security games.

Contribution

It derives conditions for ZD strategy existence, analyzes their performance, and develops algorithms for efficient computation in MTD scenarios.

Findings

ZD strategies achieve upper-bound performance similar to SSE.

Proposed algorithms reduce computational complexity for ZD strategies.

Experiments confirm the effectiveness of ZD strategies in practical applications.

Abstract

Moving Target Defense (MTD) is commonly formulated as a repeated security game to mitigate persistent threats. Although the strong Stackelberg equilibrium (SSE) characterizes the defender's optimal strategy in the leader-follower framework, computing the SSE often incurs high computational complexity, which significantly limits its practical deployment in MTD problems with multiple targets. This paper proposes adopting a zero-determinant (ZD) strategy for constructing an MTD strategy that achieves both high defensive performance and substantially low computational complexity. We first derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of ZD strategies and investigate the performance of ZD strategies, which shows their upper-bound performance matches that of the SSE strategy. We then formulate two programs to find the optimal ZD strategy parameters under different conditions. Moreover, we design an algorithm to compute the proposed ZD strategies, along with the computational complexity analysis in comparison with the traditional SSE computation. Finally, we conduct experiments on two practical applications to verify our results.