Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Game Theory in Distributed Systems Security: Foundations, Challenges, and Future Directions

Mustafa Abdallah, Saurabh Bagchi, Shaunak D. Bopardikar, Kevin Chan, Xing Gao, Murat Kantarcioglu, Congmiao Li, Peng Liu, Quanyan Zhu

TL;DR

The paper addresses securing large-scale, interdependent distributed systems by advocating a rigorous, integrated game-theoretic framework anchored in distributed systems security foundations. It surveys a spectrum of game-theoretic models—including static complete-information, imperfect-information with deception, dynamic and Stackelberg sequential, and Colonel Blotto simultaneous games—and links them to detection, diagnosis, and containment challenges in distributed infrastructures. It organizes future research into analytical, systems, and integration directions with short- and long-term horizons, stressing scalable, testbed-based evaluation and cross-disciplinary learning. The work emphasizes moving-target defenses, CPS-specific considerations, and the integration of learning with game theory to manage unknown-unknowns and evolving threats, aiming for practical, verifiable security guarantees across both personal and critical infrastructures.

Abstract

Many of our critical infrastructure systems and personal computing systems have a distributed computing systems structure. The incentives to attack them have been growing rapidly as has their attack surface due to increasing levels of connectedness. Therefore, we feel it is time to bring in rigorous reasoning to secure such systems. The distributed system security and the game theory technical communities can come together to effectively address this challenge. In this article, we lay out the foundations from each that we can build upon to achieve our goals. Next, we describe a set of research challenges for the community, organized into three categories -- analytical, systems, and integration challenges, each with "short term" time horizon (2-3 years) and "long term" (5-10 years) items. This article was conceived of through a community discussion at the 2022 NSF SaTC PI meeting.

Game Theory in Distributed Systems Security: Foundations, Challenges, and Future Directions

TL;DR

The paper addresses securing large-scale, interdependent distributed systems by advocating a rigorous, integrated game-theoretic framework anchored in distributed systems security foundations. It surveys a spectrum of game-theoretic models—including static complete-information, imperfect-information with deception, dynamic and Stackelberg sequential, and Colonel Blotto simultaneous games—and links them to detection, diagnosis, and containment challenges in distributed infrastructures. It organizes future research into analytical, systems, and integration directions with short- and long-term horizons, stressing scalable, testbed-based evaluation and cross-disciplinary learning. The work emphasizes moving-target defenses, CPS-specific considerations, and the integration of learning with game theory to manage unknown-unknowns and evolving threats, aiming for practical, verifiable security guarantees across both personal and critical infrastructures.

Abstract

Many of our critical infrastructure systems and personal computing systems have a distributed computing systems structure. The incentives to attack them have been growing rapidly as has their attack surface due to increasing levels of connectedness. Therefore, we feel it is time to bring in rigorous reasoning to secure such systems. The distributed system security and the game theory technical communities can come together to effectively address this challenge. In this article, we lay out the foundations from each that we can build upon to achieve our goals. Next, we describe a set of research challenges for the community, organized into three categories -- analytical, systems, and integration challenges, each with "short term" time horizon (2-3 years) and "long term" (5-10 years) items. This article was conceived of through a community discussion at the 2022 NSF SaTC PI meeting.
Paper Structure (9 sections, 3 figures)

This paper contains 9 sections, 3 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Foundations: Build on Them
  2. Game-theoretic Security
  3. Distributed Systems Security
  4. Challenges Ahead
  5. Analytical Directions
  6. Systems Directions
  7. Integration Directions
  8. CONCLUSION
  9. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: An overview of the flow of this paper. We first show the main foundations for game-theory modeling, and distributed systems security. We then outline the research challenges and future directions that will need the integration of the advancements of the analytical side and systems side for securing distributed systems.
  • Figure 2: A summary of the relevant literature of game-theoretic models for distributed systems security. We show the pros and cons of various game-theoretic models as applied to distributed systems security and prospective usage of each model in the different research directions outlined in our vision.
  • Figure 3: A timeline overview of research challenges and future research directions for both of analytical side and systems side (upper part), along with possible research directions of integrating both sides (lower part).