A Game-theoretic Taxonomy and Survey of Defensive Deception for Cybersecurity and Privacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cyberattacks on both databases and critical infrastructure have threatened public and private sectors. Ubiquitous tracking and wearable computing have infringed upon privacy. Advocates and engineers have recently proposed using defensive deception as a means to leverage the information asymmetry typically enjoyed by attackers as a tool for defenders. The term deception, however, has been employed broadly and with a variety of meanings. In this article, we survey 24 articles from 2008 to 2018 that use game theory to model defensive deception for cybersecurity and privacy. Then, we propose a taxonomy that defines six types of deception: perturbation, moving target defense, obfuscation, mixing, honey-x, and attacker engagement. These types are delineated by their information structures, agents, actions, and duration: precisely concepts captured by game theory. Our aims are to rigorously define types of defensive deception, to capture a snapshot of the state of the literature, to provide a menu of models that can be used for applied research, and to identify promising areas for future work. Our taxonomy provides a systematic foundation for understanding different types of defensive deception commonly encountered in cybersecurity and privacy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".