Games and Abstraction: The Science of Cyber Security

该提案解决了“我们如何做出更好的安全决策？".具体来说，我们建议开发新的方法，决策支持的基础上数学博弈论。我们的工作将支持设计安全系统的专业人员，以及负责确定系统是否具有适当安全级别的人员，特别是系统管理员。我们将开发技术来支持人类的决策和技术，使有根据的安全设计的决策，以作出。我们认识到，新兴的趋势，从企业IT系统向自带设备（BYOD）文化将带来新的挑战和变化的系统管理员的角色。然而，即使在这个勇敢的新世界中，公司仍将继续拥有核心资产，如网络基础设施和企业数据库，这些资产将需要同样的保护。可以肯定的是，一些攻击现在将来自公司防火墙内部，而不是外部。我们的团队将包括来自帝国理工学院商学院的研究人员，他们将帮助我们确保我们的模型正确反映这些新的威胁。虽然其他人已经使用博弈论方法来回答这些问题，但以前的许多工作或多或少都是临时性的。因此，由此产生的安全决策可能基于不合理的原则。特别是，通常使用抽象而不考虑抽象模型和真实的系统的属性之间的关系。我们将开发一个新的博弈论框架，使这些关系的精确分析，从而提供了一个更强大的决策支持工具。

This proposal addresses the challenge "How do we make better security decisions?". Specifically we propose to develop new approaches to decision support based on mathematical game theory. Our work will support professionals who are designing secure systems and also those charged with determining if systems have an appropriate level of security -- in particular, systems administrators. We will develop techniques to support human decision making and techniques which enable well-founded security design decisions to be made.We recognise that the emerging trend away from corporate IT systems towards a Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) culture will bring new challenges and changes to the role of systems administrator. However, even in this brave new world, companies will continue to have core assets such as the network infrastructure and the corporate database which will need the same kind of protection. It is certainly to be expected that some of the attacks will now originate from inside the corporate firewall rather than from outside. Our team will include researchers from the Imperial College Business School who will help us to ensure that our models are properly reflecting these new threats.Whilst others have used game theoretic approaches to answer these questions, much of the previous work has been more or less ad hoc. As such the resulting security decisions may be based on unsound principles. In particular, it is common to use abstractions without giving much consideration to the relationship between properties of the abstract model and the real system. We will develop a new game theoretic framework which enables a precise analysis of these relationships and hence provides a more robust decision support tool.