Node Betweenness Centrality based Defense Strategy Against Topology Inference Threat: A Static Game Theoretical Perspective
Wenlei Zhong, Yu Jiang, Qinglin Yang, Chenlu Zhuansun, Yanbin Sun, Shen Su, Zhihong Tian, Yuan Liu · 2024
Unauthorized Cyberspace mapping threats, par-ticularly those aimed at inferring network topology, pose significant risks not only to network security but also create broader social, economic, and legal challenges. It's challenging for defenders to effectively defend against these threats due to the diversity of attackers' mapping strategies and the limited resources available to defenders, which have not been well investigated in the literature. This study aims to propose a game theoretical model to analyze the mapping strategies and constraint resources. We also propose a defense strategy which is shown to be the component of the Nash Equilibrium solution to the proposed game model. Specifically, we employ a complete information static game to model the interactions between attackers and defenders. We then design a defense strategy innovatively based on node betweenness centrality. Inspired by the influence of nodes in social networks, we develop an influence propagation model to assess the potential impacts of struck nodes, incorporating these assessments into the utility functions of both attackers and defenders. Theoretical analysis shows that our proposed strategy is the defenders' strictly dominant strategy under practical conditions. Finally, the experimental results indicate that the proposed strategy is effective and robust across three types of real-world network typologies.