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Threshold FlipThem: When the Winner Does Not Need to Take All

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Decision and Game Theory for Security (GameSec 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9406))

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Abstract

We examine a FlipIt game in which there are multiple resources which a monolithic attacker is trying to compromise. This extension to FlipIt was considered in a paper in GameSec 2014, and was there called FlipThem. Our analysis of such a situation is focused on the situation where the attacker’s goal is to compromise a threshold of the resources. We use our game theoretic model to enable a defender to choose the correct configuration of resources (number of resources and the threshold) so as to ensure that it makes no sense for a rational adversary to try to attack the system. This selection is made on the basis of the relative costs of the attacker and the defender.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A renewal process is called non-arithmetic if there is no positive real number \(d>0\) such that the inter-arrival times are all the integer multiples of d.

  2. 2.

    For example \(t \le n\), or \(t \le n/2\), or \(n-t \ge B\) for some bound B.

  3. 3.

    Of course if the attacker decides not to play that is considered a good thing.

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Acknowledgements

The second author was supported by a studentship from GCHQ.This work has been supported in part by ERC Advanced Grant ERC-2010-AdG-267188-CRIPTO and by EPSRC via grant EP/I03126X.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department Mathematics and Statistics, University of Lancaster, Lancaster, UK

    David Leslie

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Chris Sherfield & Nigel P. Smart

Authors
  1. David Leslie
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  2. Chris Sherfield
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  3. Nigel P. Smart
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nigel P. Smart .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom

    MHR Khouzani

  2. University of Brighton, Brighton, United Kingdom

    Emmanouil Panaousis

  3. Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom

    George Theodorakopoulos

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Leslie, D., Sherfield, C., Smart, N.P. (2015). Threshold FlipThem: When the Winner Does Not Need to Take All. In: Khouzani, M., Panaousis, E., Theodorakopoulos, G. (eds) Decision and Game Theory for Security. GameSec 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9406. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25594-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25594-1_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-25593-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-25594-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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