Honeypot Allocation for Cyber Deception in Internet of Battlefield Things Systems

Cyber deception plays an important role in both proactive and reactive defense systems. Internet of Battlefield things connecting smart devices of any military tactical network is of great importance. The goal of cyber deception is to provide false information regarding the network state, and topology to protect the IoBT's network devices. In this paper, we propose a novel deceptive approach based on game theory that takes into account the topological aspects of the network and the criticality of each device. To find the optimal deceptive strategy, we formulate a two-player game to study the interactions between the network defender and the adversary. The Nash equilibrium of the game model is characterized. Moreover, we propose a scalable game-solving algorithm to overcome the curse of dimensionality. This approach is based on solving a smaller in-size subgame per node. Our numerical results show that the proposed deception approach effectively reduced the impact and the reward of the attacker