Game-Theoretic Learning-Based Mitigation of Insider Threats

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Gehui, Chen, Kaiwen, Parisini, Thomas, Malikopoulos, Andreas A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Gehui
Chen, Kaiwen
Parisini, Thomas
Malikopoulos, Andreas A.
author_facet Xu, Gehui
Chen, Kaiwen
Parisini, Thomas
Malikopoulos, Andreas A.
contents An insider is defined as a team member who covertly deviates from the team's optimal collaborative control strategy in pursuit of a private objective, while maintaining an outward appearance of cooperation. Such insider threats can severely undermine cooperative systems: subtle deviations may degrade collective performance, jeopardize mission success, and compromise operational safety. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for identifying and mitigating insider threats in cooperative control settings. We introduce an insider-aware, game-theoretic formulation in which the insider's hidden intention is parameterized, allowing the threat identification task to be reformulated as a parameter estimation problem. To address this challenge, we employ an online indirect dual adaptive control approach that simultaneously infers the insider's control strategy and counteracts its negative influence. By injecting properly designed probing signals, the resulting mitigation policy asymptotically recovers the nominal optimal control law - one that would be achieved under full knowledge of the insider's objective. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed identification-mitigation framework and illustrate its capability to preserve team performance even in the presence of covert adversarial behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_03222
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Game-Theoretic Learning-Based Mitigation of Insider Threats
Xu, Gehui
Chen, Kaiwen
Parisini, Thomas
Malikopoulos, Andreas A.
Optimization and Control
Computer Science and Game Theory
An insider is defined as a team member who covertly deviates from the team's optimal collaborative control strategy in pursuit of a private objective, while maintaining an outward appearance of cooperation. Such insider threats can severely undermine cooperative systems: subtle deviations may degrade collective performance, jeopardize mission success, and compromise operational safety. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for identifying and mitigating insider threats in cooperative control settings. We introduce an insider-aware, game-theoretic formulation in which the insider's hidden intention is parameterized, allowing the threat identification task to be reformulated as a parameter estimation problem. To address this challenge, we employ an online indirect dual adaptive control approach that simultaneously infers the insider's control strategy and counteracts its negative influence. By injecting properly designed probing signals, the resulting mitigation policy asymptotically recovers the nominal optimal control law - one that would be achieved under full knowledge of the insider's objective. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed identification-mitigation framework and illustrate its capability to preserve team performance even in the presence of covert adversarial behavior.
title Game-Theoretic Learning-Based Mitigation of Insider Threats
topic Optimization and Control
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03222