A Game of Double Agents: Repeated Stackelberg Games with Role Switch

We introduce a novel variation of the widely used 2-player Stackelberg game formalism. In our variation, a master player can decide to act as a leader or as a follower across the iterations of the game. This model naturally arises in many real-world applications and particularly in cyber-security scenarios, where an analyzer agent can arbitrarily decide which role to play in each iteration. We propose a first solution approach for this model assuming bounded rationality for the players and adopting a Monte Carlo Tree Search approach to devise the analyzer’s strategy. We empirically show the effectiveness of our method in two experimental domains, i.e. synthetic game instances (using randomly generated games) and malware analysis (using real malware samples).