Decision support approaches for cyber security investment
File(s)
Accepted version
Published version
Author(s)
Hankin, CL
Fielder, A
Malacaria, P
Panaousis, E
Smeraldi, F
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
When investing in cyber security resources, information security managers have to follow effective decision-making strategies. We refer to this as the cyber security investment challenge. In this paper, we consider three possible decision support methodologies for security managers to tackle this challenge. We consider methods based on game theory, combinatorial optimisation, and a hybrid of the two. Our modelling starts by building a framework where we can investigate the effectiveness of a cyber security control regarding the protection of different assets seen as targets in presence of commodity threats. As game theory captures the interaction between the endogenous organisation’s and attackers’ decisions, we consider a 2-person control game between the security manager who has to choose among different implementation levels of a cyber security control, and a commodity attacker who chooses among different targets to attack. The pure game theoretical methodology consists of a large game including all controls and all threats. In the hybrid methodology the game solutions of individual control-games along with their direct costs (e.g. financial) are combined with a knapsack algorithm to derive an optimal investment strategy. The combinatorial optimisation technique consists of a multi-objective multiple choice knapsack based strategy. To compare these approaches we built a decision support tool and a case study regarding current government guidelines. The endeavour of this work is to highlight the weaknesses and strengths of different investment methodologies for cyber security, the benefit of their interaction, and the impact that indirect costs have on cyber security investment. Going a step further in validating our work, we have shown that our decision support tool provides the same advice with the one advocated by the UK government with regard to the requirements for basic technical protection from cyber attacks in SMEs.
Date Issued
2016-06-01
Date Acceptance
2016-02-23
Citation
Decision Support Systems, 2016, 86 (1), pp.13-23
ISSN
0167-9236
Publisher
Elsevier
Start Page
13
End Page
23
Journal / Book Title
Decision Support Systems
Volume
86
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Identifier
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167923616300239
Grant Number
EP/K005790/1
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science, Information Systems
Operations Research & Management Science
Computer Science
Cyber security investments decision support
Game theory
Optimisation
RISK
Information Systems
01 Mathematical Sciences
08 Information and Computing Sciences
15 Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2016-03-19