Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Benjamin Johnson, Jens Grossklags, Nicolas Christin, John Chuang. "Nash Equilibria for Weakest Target Security Games with Heterogeneous Agents". Proceedings GameNets 2011, April, 2011.

Abstract
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 con icting incentives of individuals to act in the light of such threats. More specically, 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 nd 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, payos 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 con ict between pure economic interests, and common social norms that imply that higher levels of security are always desirable.

Electronic downloads

• HTML

  Benjamin Johnson, Jens Grossklags, Nicolas Christin, John
  Chuang. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/784.html"
  >Nash Equilibria for Weakest Target Security Games with
  Heterogeneous Agents</a>, Proceedings GameNets 2011,
  April, 2011.

• Plain text

  Benjamin Johnson, Jens Grossklags, Nicolas Christin, John
  Chuang. "Nash Equilibria for Weakest Target Security
  Games with Heterogeneous Agents". Proceedings GameNets
  2011, April, 2011.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{JohnsonGrossklagsChristinChuang11_NashEquilibriaForWeakestTargetSecurityGamesWithHeterogeneous,
      author = {Benjamin Johnson and Jens Grossklags and Nicolas
                Christin and John Chuang},
      title = {Nash Equilibria for Weakest Target Security Games
                with Heterogeneous Agents},
      booktitle = {Proceedings GameNets 2011},
      month = {April},
      year = {2011},
      abstract = {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 con icting
                incentives of individuals to act in the light of
                such threats. More specically, 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 nd 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,
                payos 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 con ict between pure
                economic interests, and common social norms that
                imply that higher levels of security are always
                desirable.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/784.html}
  }
  

Posted by Nicolas Christin on 1 Oct 2011.
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