A game theoretic approach based on intrusion tolerant systems

Despite the enormous efforts made to guarantee a great level of security in the network, this is still far from being completely solved. Hence, to continue providing proper services in threatening environments there is a need for intrusion tolerance. The purpose of an intrusion tolerant system (ITS) is to survive against every intrusion, rather than to prevent them. Unfortunately, these mechanisms of defence require a huge investment and an accurate study of the network to effectively secure the infrastructure. The weakness of the traditional network security solutions is that they lack a quantitative decision framework. Game theory approaches proved their efficiency in this issue. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a game theoretic approach to model the attack-defence interaction in taking into account both internal and external attacks and analyse the effect of intrusion tolerant system on the payoff of both the internal and external attacker and the defender. A MATLAB simulation is used to illustrate the game model and calculate the frequency of attack strategy and invest in tolerance strategy. Copyright © 2020 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.