Cyber Deception under Strategic and Irrationality Considerations

This paper presents a novel cyber deception technique that can employ fake nodes to deceive attackers. To devise such a technique, the paper uses game theory to model strategic interactions between a defender and an attacker, and prospect theory to model their possible cognitive biases, while diligently accounting for cost factors associated with attack-defense strategies. Nash Equilibrium (NE)-based strategies for deploying our devised deception tactics when the defender and the attacker are fully rational in nature as well as when they may exhibit behavioral irrationalities have been analytically characterized in the paper. Among others, our results delineate how vulnerabilities of conventional defense resources can influence adoption of deception-based defenses. Numerous simulation results have been presented that provide important insights into our developed deception-based defense strategies.