Proactive Defense Against Physical Denial of Service Attacks using Poisson Signaling Games
  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.
