Fair and private rewarding in a coalitional game of cybersecurity information sharing
Iman Vakilinia, Shamik Sengupta · IET Information Security · 2019
Cybersecurity information sharing is a key factor of cyber threat intelligence, allowing organisations to detect and prevent malicious behaviours proactively. However, stimulating organisations to participate and deterring free‐riding in such sharing is a big challenge. To this end, the sharing system should be equipped with a rewarding and participation‐fees allocation mechanisms to encourage sharing behaviour. The problem of cybersecurity information sharing as a non‐cooperative game has been studied extensively. In contrast, in this study, the authors model such a problem as a coalitional game. They investigate a rewarding and participation‐fees calculation based on profit sharing in coalitional game theory. In particular, they formulate a coalitional game between organisations and analyse the well‐known Shapley value and Nucleolus solution concepts in the cybersecurity information sharing system. Moreover, as the participation‐fees may leak sensitive information about the organisations’ cyber‐infrastructure, they study the application of differential privacy in the coalitional game theory to protect the organisation's fees while approximating the fairness.