G.Venkatesh, B.Raghupathi, Dr.U.Veerendra, MARNENI MOUNIKA

Abstract

Defensive deception techniques have emerged as a promising proactive defense mechanism to mislead an attacker and thereby achieve attack failure. However, most game-theoretic defensive deception approaches have assumed that players maintain consistent views under uncertainty. They do not consider players’ possible, subjective beliefs formed due to asymmetric information given to them. In this work, we formulate a hypergame between an attacker and a defender where they can interpret the same game differently and accordingly choose their best strategy based on their respective beliefs. This gives a chance for defensive deception strategies to manipulate an attacker’s belief, which is the key to the attacker’s decision making. We consider advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks, which perform multiple attacks in the stages of the cyber kill chain where both the attacker and the defender aim to select optimal strategies based on their beliefs. Through extensive simulation experi