Colonel Blotto Game Aided Attack-Defense Analysis in Real-World Networks

Large scale network systems such as Internet, smart grids and social networks become an indispensable part of our daily life. However, due to their inherent vulnerability as well as the limited management and operational capability, these network systems are constantly under the threat of malicious attackers. In such attack-defense scenarios, it is particularly significant to make the best use of defenders' limited resources and capability. In this paper, we propose a networked Colonel Blotto game, where the attackers and defenders allocate the limited resources on network nodes, and their utility depends on certain network performance metrics, which are defined for evaluating the performance of the whole network system. Furthermore, considering the complexity of the equilibrium analysis in large scale network systems, a co-evolution based algorithm is proposed for obtaining the practical action sets as well as achieving the mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium. Finally, relying on three real-world network systems, i.e., computer networks, Internet of vehicles and online social networks, simulation results show the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed model, which is conducive to the design, management and maintenance of real-world network systems.