Beyond Herd Immunity Against Strategic Attackers

Vilc Rufino (1, 2) , Daniel Menasché (1) , Cabral Lima (1) , Ítalo Cunha (3) , Leandro P de Aguiar (4) , Eitan Altman (5, 6, 7, 8) , Rachid El-Azouzi (6) , Francesco de Pellegrini (6) , Alberto Avritzer (4) , Michael Grottke (9)

1 UFRJ - Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro [Brasil] = Federal University of Rio de Janeiro [Brazil] = Université fédérale de Rio de Janeiro [Brésil]
2 Brazilian Navy Research Institute
3 UFMG - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais = Federal University of Minas Gerais [Belo Horizonte, Brazil]
4 Siemens Corporate Research [Princeton]
5 NEO - Network Engineering and Operations
6 LIA - Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon
7 LINCS - Laboratory of Information, Network and Communication Sciences
8 COMUE UCA - COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019)
9 FAU - Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg = University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

Herd immunity, one of the most fundamental concepts in network epidemics, occurs when a large fraction of the population of devices is immune against a virus or malware. The few individuals who have not taken countermeasures against the threat are assumed to have very low chances of infection, as they are indirectly protected by the rest of the devices in the network. Although very fundamental, herd immunity does not account for strategic attackers scanning the network for vulnerable nodes. In face of such attackers, nodes who linger vulnerable in the network become easy targets, compromising cybersecurity. In this paper, we propose an analytical model which allows us to capture the impact of countermeasures against attackers when both in-network as well as exogenous infections coexist. Using the proposed model, we show that a diverse set of potential attacks produces non-trivial equilibria, some of which go counter to herd immunity; e.g., our model suggests that nodes should adopt countermeasures even when the remainder of the nodes has already decided to do so. INDEX TERMS Cybersecurity, denial-of-service attacks, network epidemics, network security

Mots clés: counter-measures; game theory; CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy → Artificial immune systems Additional Key Words and Phrases: Herd immunity; epidemics; analytical models

Domaines: Informatique et théorie des jeux [cs.GT]; Bio-informatique [q-bio.QM]

Vilc Rufino, Daniel Menasché, Cabral Lima, Ítalo Cunha, Leandro P de Aguiar, et al.. Beyond Herd Immunity Against Strategic Attackers. IEEE Access, In press, ⟨10.1109/ACCESS.2017.DOI⟩. ⟨hal-02522148⟩