Christopher N. Gutierrez1,
Mohammed H. Almeshekah2,
Saurabh Bagchi1, and Eugene H. Spafford1
1
Purdue University,
Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS),
West Lafayette, USA,
2
King Saud University,
Department of Computer Science, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Abstract. A hypergame is a game theoretic model capturing the decisions of rational players in a conflict where misperceptions, from deception or information asymmetry, are present. We demonstrate how hypergames can model an actual security mechanism: ErsatzPassword, a defense mechanism to protect password hashes from offline brute-force attacks. Two ErsatzPassword defensive strategies are considered: to block the attacker and trigger an alarm, or to redirect the attacker into a honeynet for attack analysis. We consider the scenario where there is information asymmetry in the system and one side under-estimates or over-estimates the risk tolerance of the other side. We analyze plausible strategies for both attacker and defender and then solve 57,600 hyper-game configurations to determine the optimal 1st line defense strategies under various levels of risk tolerance and misperceptions.
Keywords: Computer Security, Deception, Game Theory
The paper published in the IFIP SEC 2018 confeence proceedings by Springer Verlag