Open Access
ARTICLE
Strategy Selection for Moving Target Defense in Incomplete Information Game
Huan Zhang1, Kangfeng Zheng1, *, Xiujuan Wang2, Shoushan Luo1, Bin Wu1
1 School of CyberSpace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100088, China.
2 College of Computer Sciences, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China.
* Corresponding Author: Kangfeng Zheng. Email: .
Computers, Materials & Continua 2020, 62(2), 763-786. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.06553
Abstract
As a core component of the network, web applications have become one of the
preferred targets for attackers because the static configuration of web applications
simplifies the exploitation of vulnerabilities by attackers. Although the moving target
defense (MTD) has been proposed to increase the attack difficulty for the attackers, there
is no solo approach can cope with different attacks; in addition, it is impossible to
implement all these approaches simultaneously due to the resource limitation. Thus, the
selection of an optimal defense strategy based on MTD has become the focus of research.
In general, the confrontation of two players in the security domain is viewed as a
stochastic game, and the reward matrices are known to both players. However, in a real
security confrontation, this scenario represents an incomplete information game. Each
player can only observe the actions performed by the opponent, and the observed actions
are not completely accurate. To accurately describe the attacker’s reward function to
reach the Nash equilibrium, this work simulated and updated the strategy selection
distribution of the attacker by observing and investigating the strategy selection history of
the attacker. Next, the possible rewards of the attacker in each confrontation via the
observation matrix were corrected. On this basis, the Nash-Q learning algorithm with
reward quantification was proposed to select the optimal strategy. Moreover, the
performances of the Minimax-Q learning algorithm and Naive-Q learning algorithm were
compared and analyzed in the MTD environment. Finally, the experimental results
showed that the strategy selection algorithm can enable defenders to select a more
reasonable defensive strategy and achieve the maximum possible reward.
Keywords
Cite This Article
H. Zhang, K. Zheng, X. Wang, S. Luo and B. Wu, "Strategy selection for moving target defense in incomplete information game,"
Computers, Materials & Continua, vol. 62, no.2, pp. 763–786, 2020.
Citations