Attacker Deterrence and Perceived Risk in a Stackelberg Security Game.

Area of Science:

• Game Theory
• Behavioral Economics
• Cybersecurity

Background:

• Stackelberg security games involve resource allocation for defense against attackers.
• Optimal defense strategies often require randomization, but attacker risk perception is unclear.
• Understanding attacker behavior is vital for effective security.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how attackers perceive risk under different randomized defense schemes.
• To determine if attackers prefer specific randomized defense strategies.
• To explore the role of risk perception in attacker decision-making.

Main Methods:

• An experiment was conducted with human subjects acting as attackers.
• Attackers chose to attack or not attack targets with randomized defenses.
• The key variable was comparing a single randomly guarded target versus imperfectly guarding all targets.

Main Results:

• When presented separately, both defense schemes had no significant effect on attacker decisions.
• When presented together, attackers showed a preference for the fixed defense scheme.
• This preference could not be explained by differences in attacker beliefs.

Conclusions:

• Attacker preference for fixed defenses suggests psychological factors influence risk perception.
• Risk perception is a critical element in understanding attacker behavior in security games.
• Findings have implications for designing more effective security strategies that account for human psychology.