In our first ever Cybersecurity Speaker Series event, we welcomed Dr. Mina Guirguis, Professor of Computer Science from Texas State University at San Marcos. Dr. Guirguis discussed how game theory techniques can be applied to many cybersecurity problems.
The use of game theory has been instrumental in advancing the state-of-the-art in security games and their wide range of applications in protecting various aspects of our cyber infrastructure. Security games allow us to model the interaction between the defender and the adversary and derive potent defense strategies. These defense strategies are randomized, making it difficult for the adversary to predict as well as efficient in utilizing the limited resources available to the defender. In this talk, Dr. Guirguis provided some background material on security games, presented a common framework for modeling stochastic games and demonstrated its application to various domains. These domains include the design of resilient wireless networks against jamming attacks, the orchestration of a run-time checks against cyber-attacks in industrial control systems and the design of assignment strategies of cyber alerts to analysts for intrusion detection in companies and organizations.