Decision-making in self-protecting software systems: a game-theoretic approach

Dynamic strategies used by attackers to break down the software system calls for dynamic countermeasure selection techniques. A significant challenge in engineering self-proctoring software system is selecting a proper countermeasure while the software systems undergoes a well-planned attack. To address this challenge, in this research work, we model the interactions between the attacker and the software system as a two-player game. Modeling such interaction using game theory enables the decision-making engine to model the strategies of the attackers while considers the effect of possible defense strategies in a dynamic attack scenario. In this research work, we aim at engineering a novel decision-making framework that utilizes game theoretic techniques to select the proper mitigation against an attack. The introduced framework consists of three high-level phases including: modeling quality goal, designing game-theoretic techniques, and realizing the decision-making engine. The first phase models the security goals of the system and maps goal-oriented model to the designed game-theoretic technique. Such goal model makes the decision-making engine capable of tracking the satisfaction of modeled goals before and after applying a mitigation strategy. The framework provides the steps to map the goal-oriented model to any game-theoretic techniques that is suitable to model the countermeasure selection.