TY - GEN
T1 - Nash equilibria for weakest target security games with heterogeneous agents
AU - Johnson, Benjamin
AU - Grossklags, Jens
AU - Christin, Nicolas
AU - Chuang, John
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was partially supported by CyLab at Carnegie Mellon under grant DAAD19-02-1-0389 from the Army Research Office, and by the National Science Foundation under ITR award CCF-0424422 (TRUST).
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Motivated attackers cannot always be blocked or deterred. In the physical-world security context, examples include suicide bombers and sexual predators. In computer networks, zero-day exploits unpredictably threaten the information economy and end users. In this paper, we study the conflicting incentives of individuals to act in the light of such threats. More specifically, in the weakest target game an attacker will always be able to compromise the agent (or agents) with the lowest protection level, but will leave all others unscathed. We find the game to exhibit a number of complex phenomena. It does not admit pure Nash equilibria, and when players are heterogeneous in some cases the game does not even admit mixed-strategy equilibria. Most outcomes from the weakest-target game are far from ideal. In fact, payoffs for most players in any Nash equilibrium are far worse than in the game's social optimum. However, under the rule of a social planner, average security investments are extremely low. The game thus leads to a conflict between pure economic interests, and common social norms that imply that higher levels of security are always desirable.
AB - Motivated attackers cannot always be blocked or deterred. In the physical-world security context, examples include suicide bombers and sexual predators. In computer networks, zero-day exploits unpredictably threaten the information economy and end users. In this paper, we study the conflicting incentives of individuals to act in the light of such threats. More specifically, in the weakest target game an attacker will always be able to compromise the agent (or agents) with the lowest protection level, but will leave all others unscathed. We find the game to exhibit a number of complex phenomena. It does not admit pure Nash equilibria, and when players are heterogeneous in some cases the game does not even admit mixed-strategy equilibria. Most outcomes from the weakest-target game are far from ideal. In fact, payoffs for most players in any Nash equilibrium are far worse than in the game's social optimum. However, under the rule of a social planner, average security investments are extremely low. The game thus leads to a conflict between pure economic interests, and common social norms that imply that higher levels of security are always desirable.
KW - Economics
KW - Game Theory
KW - Heterogeneity
KW - Security
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84869594963&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-30373-9_31
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-30373-9_31
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84869594963
SN - 9783642303722
T3 - Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
SP - 444
EP - 458
BT - Game Theory for Networks - Second International ICST Conference, GAMENETS 2011, Revised Selected Papers
T2 - 2nd International ICST Conference on Game Theory in Networks, GAMENETS 2011
Y2 - 16 April 2011 through 18 April 2011
ER -
