Volatile Memory: Behavioral Game Theory in Defensive Security
This presentation will explore some of the teachings from the young field of behavioral game theory, which empirically measures how humans behave in games, as an improvement upon prior discussions involving traditional Game Theory models in which humans are considered perfectly rational. I will use behavioral game theory to examine how people’s natural cognitive biases lead to sub-optimal behavior in their decision-making processes in adversarial games – and specifically processes related to playing defense in the information security “game.”
I will detail various sorts of games in which this sub-optimal performance manifests, how humans cognitively approach these games and touch on some of the algorithms, such as self-tuning EWAs, that help predict how people will behave in certain defender-attacker-defender (DAD) games. Finally, I will explore what sort of strategies and counter-measures can be implemented to improve defense’s performance in DAD games, incorporating techniques such as belief prompting, improved incorporation of information and decision trees.