Stackelberg game under asymmetric information in critical infrastructure system: From a complex network perspective

Modern society is highly dependent on critical infrastructures. Since many infrastructures have network functions, it is necessary to study them from the perspective of network science. Game theory provides a suitable framework to model the confrontations in critical infrastructures. Previous models that combine network science with game theory only consider the condition of complete information. However, in the real world, complete information about the target network is not always available to the attacker. In this paper, we achieve active defense by revealing the disguised network to the attacker rather than changing the structure of the target network. We first introduce a false network generation method and investigate the transformation of the node degree in the created network. Furthermore, we propose a Stackelberg game under asymmetric information named the active deception game, in which the cost constraint is considered. Experiments based on the synthetic scale-free network indicate that disclosing false information to the attacker yields a higher equilibrium payoff than revealing complete information. We analyze the equilibrium strategies and show an interesting but counterintuitive finding that the attacker tends to choose high-degree nodes, but the defender prefers selecting low-degree nodes when the attacker does not have a global dominance strategy. Our work provides a new approach to the proactive defense of infrastructure networks using information asymmetry between attack and defense sides, which deserves further study.