Abstract
Functionality of infrastructures not only depends on constituent components’ robustness but also the interdependency between components and systems. This paper studies how interdependency in infrastructures affects defense effort deployment to counter external attacks by modeling a simultaneous game between a service provider (i.e., defender) and an attacker. Interdependency effects based on three basic topological structures: bus, star, and ring are considered and compared in game theoretic
defense strategy. Results show that in star structure, the attacker’s and defender’s Nash equilibrium pure strategies are sensitive to different interdependencies whereas in the bus structure, interdependency shows little impact on both defender’s and attacker’s pure NE strategies. The sensitivity of defense and attack at Nash equilibrium with respect to target valuation, and unit cost is also presented. The result potentially provides insights on system design and resource allocation of infrastructure reinforcement.
