An Evaluation of Network Survivability under the Effect of Accumulated Experience from Sophisticated Attackers

Abstract

This paper is focused on the resource allocation of network attack and defense with mathematical programming and to optimize the problem. It adopts a concept, discount coupon, to describe the attack behavior of taking advantage of accumulated experience from his previous attack actions of minimizing future attack cost. The attacker obtains free experience before he launch an attack or from a compromised node which could further reduce the cost of an attack. The attacker’s objective is to minimize the total attack cost, while the core node is compromised and the network could not survive. Here, by transforming with node splitting into a generalized shortest path problem and applying the algorithm to optimally solve it.