Related papers: Toward a Theory of Cyber Attacks

Moving target defense has emerged as a critical paradigm of protecting a vulnerable system against persistent and stealthy attacks. To protect a system, a defender proactively changes the system configurations to limit the exposure of…

In cybersecurity, attackers range from brash, unsophisticated script kiddies and cybercriminals to stealthy, patient advanced persistent threats. When modeling these attackers, we can observe that they demonstrate different risk-seeking and…

Identifying the actual adversarial threat against a system vulnerability has been a long-standing challenge for cybersecurity research. To determine an optimal strategy for the defender, game-theoretic based decision models have been widely…

Effective game-theoretic modeling of defender-attacker behavior is becoming increasingly important. In many domains, the defender functions not only as a player but also the designer of the game's payoff structure. We study Stackelberg…

The new generation of cyber threats leverages advanced AI-aided methods, which make them capable to launch multi-stage, dynamic, and effective attacks. Current cyber-defense systems encounter various challenges to defend against such new…

The incremental diffusion of machine learning algorithms in supporting cybersecurity is creating novel defensive opportunities but also new types of risks. Multiple researches have shown that machine learning methods are vulnerable to…

In adversarial patrolling games, a mobile Defender strives to discover intrusions at vulnerable targets initiated by an Attacker. The Attacker's utility is traditionally defined as the probability of completing an attack, possibly weighted…

In multiple domains such as malware detection, automated driving systems, or fraud detection, classification algorithms are susceptible to being attacked by malicious agents willing to perturb the value of instance covariates to pursue…

As large language models grow increasingly capable, concerns about their safe deployment have intensified. While numerous alignment strategies aim to restrict harmful behavior, these defenses can still be circumvented through carefully…

Cyber data attacks are the worst-case interacting bad data to power system state estimation and cannot be detected by existing bad data detectors. In this paper, we for the first time analyze the likelihood of cyber data attacks by…

We explore a scenario involving two sites and a sequential game between a defender and an attacker, where the defender is responsible for securing the sites while the attacker aims to attack them. Each site holds a loss value for the…

Large scale cloud networks consist of distributed networking and computing elements that process critical information and thus security is a key requirement for any environment. Unfortunately, assessing the security state of such networks…

This paper studies the synthesis of control policies for an agent that has to satisfy a temporal logic specification in a partially observable environment, in the presence of an adversary. The interaction of the agent (defender) with the…

In our time cybersecurity has grown to be a topic of massive proportion at the national and enterprise levels. Our thesis is that the economic perspective and investment decision-making are vital factors in determining the outcome of the…

Many defensive measures in cyber security are still dominated by heuristics, catalogs of standard procedures, and best practices. Considering the case of data backup strategies, we aim towards mathematically modeling the underlying threat…

This paper studies the synthesis of control policies for an agent that has to satisfy a temporal logic specification in a partially observable environment, in the presence of an adversary. The interaction of the agent (defender) with the…

Characterizing attacker behavior with respect to Cyber-Physical Systems is important to assuring the security posture and resilience of these systems. Classical cyber vulnerability assessment approaches rely on the knowledge and experience…

In Stackelberg security games when information about the attacker's payoffs is uncertain, algorithms have been proposed to learn the optimal defender commitment by interacting with the attacker and observing their best responses. In this…

This letter presents an approach to guarantee online safety of a cyber-physical system under multiple state and input constraints. Our proposed framework, called gatekeeper, recursively guarantees the existence of an infinite-horizon…

Protecting against multi-step attacks of uncertain duration and timing forces defenders into an indefinite, always ongoing, resource-intensive response. To effectively allocate resources, a defender must be able to analyze multi-step…