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Becoming Cybercriminals: Incentives in Networks with Interdependent Security

Incentives in Networks with Interdependent Security

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Decision and Game Theory for Security (GameSec 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9996))

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Abstract

We study users’ incentives to become cybercriminals when network security is interdependent. We present a game-theoretic model in which each player (i.e., network user) decides his type, honest or malicious. Honest users represent law-abiding network users, while malicious users represent cybercriminals. After deciding on their types, the users make their security choices. We will follow [29], where breach probabilities for large-scale networks are obtained from a standard interdependent security (IDS) setup. In large-scale IDS networks, the breach probability of each player becomes a function of two variables: the player’s own security action and network security, which is an aggregate characteristic of the network; network security is computed from the security actions of the individual nodes that comprise the network. This allows us to quantify user security choices in networks with IDS even when users have only very limited, aggregate information about security choices of other users of the network.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example in [4, 18, 22], cybercrime is approached from value-chain perspective.

  2. 2.

    In other words, the Inada conditions hold.

  3. 3.

    If (52) holds for all \(M\in [1,N-1]\), we let \(\tilde{M}=0\).

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported in part by FORCES (Foundations Of Resilient CybEr-Physical Systems), which receives support from the National Science Foundation (NSF award numbers CNS-1238959, CNS-1238962, CNS-1239054, CNS-1239166).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, USA

    Aron Laszka & Galina Schwartz

Authors
  1. Aron Laszka
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  2. Galina Schwartz
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Correspondence to Aron Laszka .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. New York University , New York, New York, USA

    Quanyan Zhu

  2. The University of Melbourne , Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Tansu Alpcan

  3. University of Brighton , Brighton, United Kingdom

    Emmanouil Panaousis

  4. University of Southern California , Los Angeles, California, USA

    Milind Tambe

  5. Carnegie Mellon University , Pittsburgh, New York, USA

    William Casey

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Laszka, A., Schwartz, G. (2016). Becoming Cybercriminals: Incentives in Networks with Interdependent Security. In: Zhu, Q., Alpcan, T., Panaousis, E., Tambe, M., Casey, W. (eds) Decision and Game Theory for Security. GameSec 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9996. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47413-7_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47413-7_20

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