Game Theoretic Model of Strategic Honeypot Selection in Computer Networks

A honeypot is a decoy computer system used in network security to waste the time and resources of attackers and to analyze their behaviors. While there has been significant research on how to design honeypot systems, less is known about how to use honeypots strategically in network defense. Based on formal deception games, we develop two game-theoretic models that provide insight into how valuable should honeypots look like to maximize the probability that a rational attacker will attack a honeypot. The first model captures a static situation and the second allows attackers to imperfectly probe some of the systems on the network to determine which ones are likely to be real systems (and not honeypots) before launching an attack. We formally analyze the properties of the optimal strategies in the games and provide linear programs for their computation. Finally, we present the optimal solutions for a set of instances of the games and evaluate their quality in comparison to several baselines.