INVITATION TO CYBERSECURITY 130 because companies compete with one another to sell products. Each company makes plans without knowing what the other companies in the market are going to do and try to anticipate how they can outdo one another. Game theory is also taught in other academic disciplines on college campuses, including military studies programs. Unfortunately, game theory is not typically addressed in cybersecurity education, although the academic literature contains many examples of game theory being applied to cybersecurity. Because cybersecurity is adversarial in its essence, game theory is a natural fit for cybersecurity students. Game theory was formally established as an academic discipline with the 1944 publication of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann (yes, the same von Neumann from Chapter 2) and Oskar Morgenstern. John Nash went on to make major contributions to the field in the 1950s. Game theory is a mathematically rigorous approach to analyzing strategic contests (i.e., games). It can be defined as the study of interdependent decision making between multiple players where each player strives to maximize his own utility. This definition highlights the three primary ingredients of a game: players, interdependent choices, and utility preferences. The players are the actors in the game. Interdependent choices means that the outcome for each player depends in part on the choices made by the other players. Utility preferences are an ordering of the outcomes from least to most desirable. There are many types of games, including: two player and multi-player, cooperative and non-cooperative, zero-sum and non-zero sum, one shot and repeated play, etc. This chapter covers only basic terminology and general principles. The Hacker’s Dilemma Trudy and Eve, two hackers, are nabbed by law enforcement and accused of a serious cybercrime. On the way to the police station, they both agree to say nothing to the cops. They know that the cops may have evidence of their cyber intrusion into Acme Bank, but probably not enough to convict them of their salami attack, where Trudy and Eve diverted small amounts of money in “transactions fees” from millions of bank transfers over several months, eventually accumulating a huge sum of money in an off-shore bank account. Arriving at the police station, they are placed in separate interrogation rooms, and Eve is presented with indisputable evidence of her having gained unauthorized access to the Acme network of computers. The interrogator then offered Eve a deal, “Look, we have enough here to lock you up for a year under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), but I am willing to let you off on probation if you just tell me about Trudy’s involvement in the salami attack.” What should Eve do? She had already agreed with Trudy to keep her mouth shut, but now she faces a hacker’s dilemma: should she keep her agreement with Trudy or betray her?
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