Defence and attack of systems with variable attacker system structure detection probability

Abstract

A system consists of identical elements. The cumulative performance of these elements should meet a demand. The defender applies three types of defensive actions to reduce a damage associated with system performance reduction caused by an external attack: deploying separated redundant genuine system elements, deploying false elements, and protecting genuine elements. If the attacker cannot distinguish between genuine and false elements, he chooses a number of elements to attack and then selects the elements at random, distributing his resources equally across these elements. By obtaining intelligence data, the attacker can get full information about the system structure and identify false and unprotected genuine elements. The defender estimates the probability that the attacker can identify all system elements. This paper analyses the influence of this probability in a non-cooperative two-period minmax game between the defender and the attacker.

Keywords:

• attack
• defence
• system demand
• elements
• false targets
• redundancy

Acknowledgements

We thank three anonymous referees of this journal for useful comments.