Title: Proactive Defense Against Physical Denial of Service Attacks using Poisson Signaling Games,
Abstract: While the Internet of things (IoT) promises to improve areas such as energy
efficiency, health care, and transportation, it is highly vulnerable to
cyberattacks. In particular, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks
overload the bandwidth of a server. But many IoT devices form part of
cyber-physical systems (CPS). Therefore, they can be used to launch "physical"
denial-of-service attacks (PDoS) in which IoT devices overflow the "physical
bandwidth" of a CPS. In this paper, we quantify the population-based risk to a
group of IoT devices targeted by malware for a PDoS attack. In order to model
the recruitment of bots, we develop a "Poisson signaling game," a signaling
game with an unknown number of receivers, which have varying abilities to
detect deception. Then we use a version of this game to analyze two mechanisms
(legal and economic) to deter botnet recruitment. Equilibrium results indicate
that 1) defenders can bound botnet activity, and 2) legislating a minimum level
of security has only a limited effect, while incentivizing active defense can
decrease botnet activity arbitrarily. This work provides a quantitative
foundation for proactive PDoS defense.