Cyber Security via Minority Games with Epistatic Signaling

We present a game theoretic framework, modeling strategic interactions among humans and things, which are assumed to be interconnected by a social-technological network, as in Internet of Humans and Things (IOHT). Often a pair of agents in the network interacts in order for an informed sender-agent to signal an uninformed receiver-agent to take an action that benefits each of the players -- the benefits to the pair of agents are modeled by two separate utility functions, both depending on the sender's private information, the signal exchanged, and the receiver's revealed (and unrevealed) action. In general, the two agents' utilities may not be aligned and may encourage deceptive behavior. A rather troublesome situation occurs when deceptions are employed to breach the security of the system, thus making the entire social-technological network unreliable. We explore two augmentations to the original evolutionary signaling game by first enhancing mutation bias toward strategies performing well in previous populations and secondly by allowing the parameters of the utility functions to dependent on population preferences giving rise to a minority game with epistatic signaling. The resulting game systems are empirically studied through extensive computer simulation.