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Capacity ATL: Reasoning About Agent Profiles and Applications to Cybersecurity

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Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14282))

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Abstract

Cybersecurity is a context in which at least two agents, namely a defender and an attacker, interact to achieve conflicting objectives. As such, its analysis with game theory is natural. Most game theoretic approaches for cybersecurity rely on analytical games described by a reward function depending on agent actions, and the goal is often to find equilibriums (e.g, Nash equilibrium). However, these techniques imply a new analysis for each particular system or network. Contrarily, defining Multi-Agent System (MAS) formalisms adapted to describe multi-step attacks can help generically design defense systems. Moreover, model checking defender strategic abilities in the MAS offers guarantees on active cyber defenses leveraged by the security team, including honeypots (i.e, deception mechanisms) and Moving Target Defenses (i.e, system reconfiguration). The existing formalisms do not capture all the aspects of active defenses, so we developed Capacity Alternating-time Temporal Logic to reason about strategic abilities under imperfect information of the agents’ capacities. During my thesis, we plan to explore further the use of MAS verification for active cybersecurity.

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Acknowledgement

This work was carried out within SEIDO Lab, a joint research laboratory covering research topics in the field of smart grids, e.g, distributed intelligence, service collaboration, cybersecurity, and privacy. It involves researchers from academia (Télécom Paris, Télécom SudParis, CNRS LAAS) and industry (EDF R &D).

The author thank Vadim Malvone, Jean Leneutre, and Youssef Laarouchi for their contribution to the work.

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Correspondence to Gabriel Ballot .

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Ballot, G. (2023). Capacity ATL: Reasoning About Agent Profiles and Applications to Cybersecurity. In: Malvone, V., Murano, A. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems. EUMAS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14282. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43264-4_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43264-4_34

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