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Optimally Selecting the Timing of Zero-Day Attack via Spatial Evolutionary Game

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10393))

Abstract

Zero-day attacks pose a serious threat to the government agencies and companies. To get better protection of the internet infrastructure, it is very important for the defenders to analyze the behavior of attackers who exploit the zero-day vulnerabilities and predict their attack timing. For attackers, when to exploit the zero-day vulnerability means a tough tradeoff between profit and risk: If the attackers exploit too soon, they may get limited profits; too late, they may suffer the higher risk of being found before the attack. To help defenders make a better prediction, this paper computes the optimal timing from the perspective of attackers. We use an evolutionary game to estimate the risk of being found and then chooses the optimal timing based on the risk and profit. In detail, we design a learning strategy to deal with individual differences among multi-attackers, and use spatial structure to model the evolutionary process. The experiment results show the efficiency of this approach.

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2016YFB0800702), and NSFC General Projects (No. 61672515).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.cert.org.cn/publish/main/upload/File/2016CNVDannual1.pdf.

  2. 2.

    http://thehackernews.com/2016/03/bank-hacking-malware.html.

  3. 3.

    Baidu is the predominant search engine in China.

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Correspondence to Yunchuan Guo .

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Sun, Y., Yin, L., Guo, Y., Li, F., Fang, B. (2017). Optimally Selecting the Timing of Zero-Day Attack via Spatial Evolutionary Game. In: Ibrahim, S., Choo, KK., Yan, Z., Pedrycz, W. (eds) Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing. ICA3PP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10393. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65482-9_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65482-9_21

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