Game-theoretic Resource Allocation for Malicious Packet Detection in Computer Networks

Citation:

Ondrej Vanek, Zhengyu Yin, Manish Jain, Branislav Bosansky, Milind Tambe, and Michal Pechoucek. 2012. “Game-theoretic Resource Allocation for Malicious Packet Detection in Computer Networks .” In International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) .

Abstract:

We study the problem of optimal resource allocation for packet selection and inspection to detect potential threats in large computer networks with multiple valuable computers of differing importance. An attacker tries to harm these targets by sending malicious packets from multiple entry points of the network; the defender thus needs to optimally allocate his resources to maximize the probability of malicious packet detection under network latency constraints. We formulate the problem as a graph-based security game with multiple resources of heterogeneous capabilities and propose a mathematical program for finding optimal solutions. Due to the very limited scalability caused by the large attacker’s strategy space and non-linearity of the program, we investigate solutions with approximated utility function and propose Grande, a novel polynomial approximate algorithm utilizing submodularity of the problem able to find solutions with a bounded error on problem of a realistic size.
See also: 2012