A Red/Blue Video Game for Hide&Seek Analysis for Hardware Trojans and the Seeker's Dilemma
Peter Jamieson, Obed Amaning-Yeboah, Jared Butler, Deniz Misirlioglu, Riley Taylor, Suman Bhunia · 2025
This paper describes our work in creating a video game to analyze the human dynamics of a Hide&Seek game. By harnessing human computation, we use this approach to get insights into how humans in a game Hide&Seek help understand how this relates to other problems, such as how Hardware Trojans might be hidden in an Integrated Chip. Hide&Seek can be directly related to cybersecurity, and in recent work, this idea has been extended further for hardware trojans in the perspective of The Seeker's Dilemma (an extension of Hide&Seek on a graph). Within the cybersecurity context, Hide&Seek is analogous to a continuous game of cat-and-mouse: the red player (the cat) assumes the role of the seeker, while the blue player (the mouse) acts as the hider. This study aims to model these games with human players and mathematical representations of Hide&Seek on a graph to collect data to better understand the hiding and seeking problems for a given graph. We describe the video game and provide results for a small sample of players hiding and seeking on three levels/graphs.