Cyber–Physical Correlation Effects in Defense Games for Large Discrete Infrastructures

Nageswara S. V. Rao, Chris Y. T. Ma, Fei He, David K. Y. Yau and Jun Zhuang ()
Additional contact information
Nageswara S. V. Rao: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, USA
Chris Y. T. Ma: Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong, China
Fei He: The Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Texas A&M University, Kingsville, TX 78363, USA
David K. Y. Yau: Department of Computer Science, Singapore University of Technology and Design, 8 Somapah Road, Singapore 487372, Singapore

Games, 2018, vol. 9, issue 3, 1-24

Abstract: In certain critical infrastructures, correlations between cyber and physical components can be exploited to launch strategic attacks, so that disruptions to one component may affect others and possibly the entire infrastructure. Such correlations must be explicitly taken into account in ensuring the survival of the infrastructure. For large discrete infrastructures characterized by the number of cyber and physical components, we characterize the cyber–physical interactions at two levels: (i) the cyber–physical failure correlation function specifies the conditional survival probability of the cyber sub-infrastructure given that of the physical sub-infrastructure (both specified by their marginal probabilities), and (ii) individual survival probabilities of both sub-infrastructures are characterized by first-order differential conditions expressed in terms of their multiplier functions. We formulate an abstract problem of ensuring the survival probability of a cyber–physical infrastructure with discrete components as a game between the provider and attacker, whose utility functions are composed of infrastructure survival probability terms and cost terms, both expressed in terms of the number of components attacked and reinforced. We derive Nash equilibrium conditions and sensitivity functions that highlight the dependence of infrastructure survival probability on cost terms, correlation functions, multiplier functions, and sub-infrastructure survival probabilities. We apply these analytical results to characterize the defense postures of simplified models of metro systems, cloud computing infrastructures, and smart power grids.

Keywords: networked systems; cyber–physical infrastructures; aggregated correlations functions; sum-form, product-form, and composite utility functions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/9/3/52/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/9/3/52/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jgames:v:9:y:2018:i:3:p:52-:d:159547

Access Statistics for this article

Games is currently edited by Ms. Susie Huang

More articles in Games from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().