A Novel Attack-and-Defense Signaling Game for Optimal Deceptive Defense Strategy Choice

Increasingly, more administrators (defenders) are using defense strategies with deception such as honeypots to improve the IoT network security in response to attacks. Using game theory, the signaling game is leveraged to describe the confrontation between attacks and defenses. However, the traditional approach focuses only on the defender; the analysis from the attacker side is ignored. Moreover, insufficient analysis has been conducted on the optimal defense strategy with deception when the model is established with the signaling game. In our work, the signaling game model is extended to a novel two-way signaling game model to describe the game from the perspectives of both the defender and the attacker. First, the improved model is formally defined, and an algorithm is proposed for identifying the refined Bayesian equilibrium. Then, according to the calculated benefits, optimal strategies choice for both the attacker and the defender in the game are analyzed. Last, a simulation is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed model and to demonstrate that the defense strategy with deception is optimal for the defender.