INVITATION TO CYBERSECURITY 142 In 1921 French mathematician Émile Borel outlined a strategic contest that later became known as the Colonel Blotto game. In the Colonel Blotto game, players allocate soldiers to battlefields, and the player who allocates the most soldiers to a battlefield wins that battlefield. Whether the player allocates one more or one hundred more soldiers, the result is the same. Therefore, it pays to win battlefields by small margins because this frees up more resources to allocate to other battlefields. The Colonel Blotto game is a fundamental model of scarce resource allocation. Economists have applied it to the analysis of electoral competitions in which the candidates (the colonels) compete over battleground states (battlefields) and must decide how much campaign money (soldiers) to spend on each state. The quantity of each state’s electoral votes determines its utility. The candidates’ budgets are limited and they do not know ahead of time how much campaign money their opponent has allocated to each state, but the idea is that whichever side allocates the most money to a particular state will win that state. This is clearly a simplifying assumption, but this type of analysis can still provide helpful insight into making strategic choices. There are many variations of the basic Colonel Blotto game, including the numbers of battlefields and soldiers and the values of the battlefields, and there are also different ways to resolve ties, including not awarding the utility to either player or splitting it between the players. The Colonel Blotto game is important because scarce resource allocation is an everyday phenomenon. It is especially critical in security contexts because, as we know, there is no such thing as 100% security. Protective resources are always limited. Defenders need to allocate their man hours and dollars as efficiently as possible to get the “biggest bang for their buck.” In the specific Colonel Blotto game outlined above (see Figure 6.7), the three battlefields labeled X, Y, and Z, are all equally valuable and each colonel wants to win as many battlefields as possible. Because companies of soldiers cannot be broken up, and each colonel has the same number of companies, it is impossible to win all three battlefields. The best each colonel can hope for is to win two which would result in an overall victory. Figure 6.7 The Colonel Blotto game.
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