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Cyber Warfare pp 207–220Cite as

CyberWar Game: A Paradigm for Understanding New Challenges of Cyber War

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Part of the book series: Advances in Information Security ((ADIS,volume 56))

Abstract

Cyber-war is a growing form of threat to our society that involves multiple players executing simultaneously offensive and defensive operations. Given that cyber space is hyper dimensional and dynamic, human decision making must also incorporate numerous attributes and must be agile and adaptive. In this chapter, we review how computational models of human cognition can be scaled up from an individual model of a defender operating in a hostile environment, through a pair of models representing a defender and an attacker to multi-agents in a cyber-war. Following, we propose to study the decision making processes that drive the dynamics of cyber-war using a multi-agent model comprising of cognitive agents that learn to make decisions according to Instance-Based Learning Theory (IBLT). In this paradigm, the CyberWar game, assets and power are two key attributes that influence the decisions of agents. Assets represent the key resource that an agent is protecting from attacks while power represents technical prowess of an agent’s cyber security. All the agents share the same goal of maximizing their assets and they learn from experience to attack other agents and defend themselves in order to meet this goal. Importantly, they don’t learn by using predefined strategies, as many multi-agent models do, but instead they learn from experience according to the situation and actions of others, as suggested by the IBLT’s process. This chapter contributes to current research by: proposing a novel paradigm to study behavior in cyber-war, using a well-known cognitive model of decisions from experience to predict what possible human behavior would be in a simulated cyber-war, and demonstrating novel predictions regarding the effects of power and assets, two main contributors to cyber-war.

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Acknowledgments

This research was partly supported by a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Award (MURI; # W911NF-09-1-0525) from Army Research Office and by the Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-13-2-0045 (ARL Cyber Security CRA). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation here on. The authors would like to thank Hau-yu Wong, Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, for help with editorial work in the paper. We also would like to thank Prashanth Rajivan for supporting the implementation of the Netlogo model and helpful inputs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, 4609 Winthrop Street, Suite 102, 15213, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Noam Ben-Asher & Cleotilde Gonzalez

Authors
  1. Noam Ben-Asher
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  2. Cleotilde Gonzalez
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Correspondence to Noam Ben-Asher .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

    Sushil Jajodia

  2. Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA

    Paulo Shakarian

  3. Computer Science Department, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

    V.S. Subrahmanian

  4. The MITRE Corporation, McLean, Virginia, USA

    Vipin Swarup

  5. Information Sciences Directorate, Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA

    Cliff Wang

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Ben-Asher, N., Gonzalez, C. (2015). CyberWar Game: A Paradigm for Understanding New Challenges of Cyber War. In: Jajodia, S., Shakarian, P., Subrahmanian, V., Swarup, V., Wang, C. (eds) Cyber Warfare. Advances in Information Security, vol 56. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14039-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14039-1_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-14038-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14039-1

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