Upcoming Event: Center for Autonomy Seminar

Dynamic Games for Cyber Deception

Quanyan Zhu, New York University

Abstract

Deception and anti-deception technologies are new paradigms of active cyber defense. They provide defenders a proactive and autonomous security mechanism by engaging the adversaries and influencing their moves to the defender’s advantage. Game theory captures the strategic and self-interested nature of attackers and defenders in cybersecurity. It provides an ideal set of quantitative tools to develop such a framework to analyze and design deception. In this talk, we first present a taxonomy of deception and counter-deception and understand how they can be conceptualized, quantified, and designed or mitigated. Then, we present a class of dynamic games of incomplete information to capture the fundamental characteristics of deception and demonstrate the applications of game theory and learning in problems such as attack engagement, lateral movement, and information manipulation. The talk will also discuss open problems and research challenges that the game theory community can address and contribute with an objective to build a multidisciplinary bridge between game theory and cybersecurity.

Biography

Quanyan Zhu received B. Eng. in Honors Electrical Engineering from McGill University in 2006, M. A. Sc. from the University of Toronto in 2008, and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2013. After stints at Princeton University, he is currently an associate professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York University (NYU). He is an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and Center for Cyber Security (CCS) at NYU.  His current research interests include game theory, machine learning, cyber deception, network optimization and control, smart cities, Internet of Things, and cyber-physical systems. He serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems and IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering. He currently serves as the technical committee chair on security and privacy for the IEEE Control Systems Society.