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Adaptive Security Response Strategies Through Conjectural Online Learning
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Computer Science, Network and Systems Engineering.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1773-8354
New York University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York, NY, USA.
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Computer Science, Network and Systems Engineering.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6039-8493
New York University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York, NY, USA.
2025 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, ISSN 1556-6013, E-ISSN 1556-6021, Vol. 20, p. 4055-4070Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

We study the problem of learning adaptive security response strategies for an IT infrastructure. We formulate the interaction between an attacker and a defender as a partially observed, non-stationary game. We relax the standard assumption that the game model is correctly specified and consider that each player has a probabilistic conjecture about the model, which may be misspecified in the sense that the true model has probability 0. This formulation allows us to capture uncertainty and misconception about the infrastructure and the intents of the players. To learn effective game strategies online, we design Conjectural Online Learning (COL), a novel method where a player iteratively adapts its conjecture using Bayesian learning and updates its strategy through rollout. We prove that the conjectures converge to best fits, and we provide a bound on the performance improvement that rollout enables with a conjectured model. To characterize the steady state of the game, we propose a variant of the Berk-Nash equilibrium. We present COL through an intrusion response use case. Testbed evaluations show that COL produces effective security strategies that adapt to a changing environment. We also find that COL enables faster convergence than current reinforcement learning techniques.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2025. Vol. 20, p. 4055-4070
Keywords [en]
Bayesian learning, Berk-Nash equilibrium, Cybersecurity, game theory, network security, rollout
National Category
Computer Sciences Probability Theory and Statistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-363203DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2025.3558600ISI: 001473091500004Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105003490797OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-363203DiVA, id: diva2:1956910
Note

QC 20250609

Available from: 2025-05-07 Created: 2025-05-07 Last updated: 2025-06-09Bibliographically approved

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Hammar, KimStadler, Rolf

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