Related papers: Toward a Theory of Cyber Attacks
Traditional security analyses are often geared towards cryptographic primitives or protocols. Although such analyses are necessary, they cannot address a defender's need for insight into {\em which aspects of a networked system having a…
Cyber deception is an emerging proactive defense strategy to counter increasingly sophisticated attacks such as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) by misleading and distracting attackers from critical assets. However, since deception…
Anticipating the strategies of potential attackers is crucial for protecting critical infrastructure. We can represent the challenge of the defenders of such infrastructure as a Stackelberg security game. The defender must decide how to…
Stealthy attacks are a major cyber-security threat. In practice, both attackers and defenders have resource constraints that could limit their capabilities. Hence, to develop robust defense strategies, a promising approach is to utilize…
The concept of active cyber defense has been proposed for years. However, there are no mathematical models for characterizing the effectiveness of active cyber defense. In this paper, we fill the void by proposing a novel Markov process…
Similar to a strategic interaction between rational and intelligent agents, cryptography problems can be examined through the prism of game theory. In this setting, the agent aiming to protect a message is called the defender, while the one…
Designing cyber defense systems to account for cognitive biases in human decision making has demonstrated significant success in improving performance against human attackers. However, much of the attention in this area has focused on…
We develop an analytical Stackelberg game framework for optimal resource allocation in a sequential attacker--defender setting with a finite set of assets and probabilistic attacks. The defender commits to a mixed protection strategy, after…
Cyber-secure networked control is modeled, analyzed, and experimentally illustrated in this paper. An attack space defined by the adversary's system knowledge, disclosure, and disruption resources is introduced. Adversaries constrained by…
This paper investigates recently proposed approaches for defending against adversarial examples and evaluating adversarial robustness. We motivate 'adversarial risk' as an objective for achieving models robust to worst-case inputs. We then…
Adversarial attacks pose significant threats to the reliability and safety of deep learning models, especially in critical domains such as medical imaging. This paper introduces a novel framework that integrates conformal prediction with…
We develop a queueing-theoretic framework to model the temporal evolution of cyber-attack surfaces, where the number of active vulnerabilities is represented as the backlog of a queue. Vulnerabilities arrive as they are discovered or…
We formulate and analyze a simplest Markov decision process model for intrusion tolerance problems, assuming that (i) each attack proceeds through one or more steps before the system's security fails, (ii) defensive responses that target…
Motivated by safety-critical classification problems, we investigate adversarial attacks against cost-sensitive classifiers. We use current state-of-the-art adversarially-resistant neural network classifiers [1] as the underlying models.…
Progressively intricate cyber infiltration mechanisms have made conventional means of defense, such as firewalls and malware detectors, incompetent. These sophisticated infiltration mechanisms can study the defender's behavior, identify…
In recent years machine learning algorithms, and more specifically deep learning algorithms, have been widely used in many fields, including cyber security. However, machine learning systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, and this…
Ransomware is a growing threat to individuals and enterprises alike, constituting a major factor in cyber insurance and in the security planning of every organization. Although the game theoretic lens often frames the game as a competition…
We consider a perimeter defense problem in which a single vehicle seeks to defend a compact region from intruders in a one-dimensional environment parameterized by the perimeter size and the intruder-to-vehicle speed ratio. The intruders…
We study the security of interaction protocols when incentives of participants are taken into account. We begin by formally defining correctness of a protocol, given a notion of rationality and utilities of participating agents. Based on…
With the developing of the attack and defense technology, the cyber environment has been more and more sophisticated. We failed to give an accurate evaluation of network security situation, as we lack a more accurate quantitative evaluation…