Print Email Facebook Twitter Protecting against network infections: A game theoretic perspective Title Protecting against network infections: A game theoretic perspective Author Omic, J. Orda, A. Van Mieghem, P. Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Network Architectures and Services Date 2009-04-19 Abstract Security breaches and attacks are critical problems in today’s networking. A key-point is that the security of each host depends not only on the protection strategies it chooses to adopt but also on those chosen by other hosts in the network. The spread of Internet worms and viruses is only one example. This class of problems has two aspects. First, it deals with epidemic processes, and as such calls for the employment of epidemic theory. Second, the distributed and autonomous nature of decision-making in major classes of networks (e.g., P2P, adhoc, and most notably the Internet) call for the employment of game theoretical approaches. Accordingly, we propose a unified framework that combines the N-intertwined, SIS epidemic model with a noncooperative game model. We determine the existence of a Nash equilibrium of the respective game and characterize its properties. We show that its quality, in terms of overall network security, largely depends on the underlying topology. We then provide a bound on the level of system inefficiency due to the noncooperative behavior, namely, the “price of anarchy” of the game. We observe that the price of anarchy may be prohibitively high, hence we propose a scheme for steering users towards socially efficient behavior. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f2f2f510-b00a-4363-a2ea-0f88554ea63e Publisher IEEE Source 28th Annual Conference IEEE INFOCOM 2009, April 19-25 2009 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2009 Omic, J., Orda, A. Van Mieghem, P. Files PDF INFOCOM09_virusspread_gam ... theory.pdf 205.2 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:f2f2f510-b00a-4363-a2ea-0f88554ea63e/datastream/OBJ/view