Choosing what to protect when attacker resources and asset valuations are uncertain

Kjell Hausken

Operations Research and Decisions, 2014, vol. 24, issue 3, 23-44

Abstract: The situation has been modelled where the attacker’s resources are unknown to the defender. Protecting assets presupposes that the defender has some information on the attacker’s resource capabilities. An attacker targets one of two assets. The attacker’s resources and valuations of these assets are drawn probabilistically. We specify when the isoutility curves are upward sloping (the defender prefers to invest less in defense, thus leading to higher probabilities of success for attacks on both as- sets) or downward sloping (e.g. when one asset has a low value or high unit defense cost). This stands in contrast to earlier research and results from the uncertainty regarding the level of the attacker’s resources. We determine which asset the attacker targets depending on his type, unit attack costs, the contest intensity, and investment in defense. A two stage game is considered, where the defender moves first and the attacker moves second. When both assets are equivalent and are treated equivalently by both players, an interior equilibrium exists when the contest intensity is low, and a corner equilibrium with no defense exists when the contest intensity is large and the attacker holds large resources. Defense efforts are inverse U shaped in the attacker’s resources.

Keywords: assets; defense; attack; game theory; uncertainty; resources; valuations; contest success function; optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ord.pwr.edu.pl/assets/papers_archive/1105%20-%20published.pdf (application/pdf)

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:wut:journl:v:3:y:2014:p:23-44:id:1105

DOI: 10.5277/ord140302

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research and Decisions from Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Faculty of Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Adam Kasperski ().