A Stackelberg Security Game for Adversarial Outbreak Detection in the Internet of Things

With limited computing resources and a lack of physical lines of defense, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become a focus of cyberattacks. In recent years, outbreak propagation attacks against the IoT have occurred frequently, and these attacks are often strategical. In order to detect the outbreak propagation as soon as possible, t embedded Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are widely deployed in the IoT. This paper tackles the problem of outbreak detection in adversarial environment in the IoT. A dynamic scheduling strategy based on specific IDSs monitoring of IoT devices is proposed to avoid strategic attacks. Firstly, we formulate the interaction between the defender and attacker as a Stackelberg game in which the defender first chooses a set of device nodes to activate, and then the attacker selects one seed (one device node) to spread the worms. This yields an extremely complex bilevel optimization problem. Our approach is to build a modified Column Generation framework for computing the optimal strategy effectively. The optimal response of the defender’s problem is expressed as mixed-integer linear programming (MILPs). It is proved that the solution of the defender’s optimal response is a NP-hard problem. Moreover, the optimal response of defenders is improved by an approximate algorithm--a greedy algorithm. Finally, the proposed scheme is tested on some randomly generated instances. The experimental results show that the scheme is effective for monitoring optimal scheduling.