Learning to Defend by Attacking (and Vice-Versa): Transfer of Learning in Cybersecurity Games

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Malloy, Tailia, Gonzalez, Cleotilde
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Malloy, Tailia
Gonzalez, Cleotilde
author_facet Malloy, Tailia
Gonzalez, Cleotilde
contents Designing cyber defense systems to account for cognitive biases in human decision making has demonstrated significant success in improving performance against human attackers. However, much of the attention in this area has focused on relatively simple accounts of biases in human attackers, and little is known about adversarial behavior or how defenses could be improved by disrupting attacker's behavior. In this work, we present a novel model of human decision-making inspired by the cognitive faculties of Instance-Based Learning Theory, Theory of Mind, and Transfer of Learning. This model functions by learning from both roles in a security scenario: defender and attacker, and by making predictions of the opponent's beliefs, intentions, and actions. The proposed model can better defend against attacks from a wide range of opponents compared to alternatives that attempt to perform optimally without accounting for human biases. Additionally, the proposed model performs better against a range of human-like behavior by explicitly modeling human transfer of learning, which has not yet been applied to cyber defense scenarios. Results from simulation experiments demonstrate the potential usefulness of cognitively inspired models of agents trained in attack and defense roles and how these insights could potentially be used in real-world cybersecurity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_02165
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Defend by Attacking (and Vice-Versa): Transfer of Learning in Cybersecurity Games
Malloy, Tailia
Gonzalez, Cleotilde
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Designing cyber defense systems to account for cognitive biases in human decision making has demonstrated significant success in improving performance against human attackers. However, much of the attention in this area has focused on relatively simple accounts of biases in human attackers, and little is known about adversarial behavior or how defenses could be improved by disrupting attacker's behavior. In this work, we present a novel model of human decision-making inspired by the cognitive faculties of Instance-Based Learning Theory, Theory of Mind, and Transfer of Learning. This model functions by learning from both roles in a security scenario: defender and attacker, and by making predictions of the opponent's beliefs, intentions, and actions. The proposed model can better defend against attacks from a wide range of opponents compared to alternatives that attempt to perform optimally without accounting for human biases. Additionally, the proposed model performs better against a range of human-like behavior by explicitly modeling human transfer of learning, which has not yet been applied to cyber defense scenarios. Results from simulation experiments demonstrate the potential usefulness of cognitively inspired models of agents trained in attack and defense roles and how these insights could potentially be used in real-world cybersecurity.
title Learning to Defend by Attacking (and Vice-Versa): Transfer of Learning in Cybersecurity Games
topic Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02165