A Large-Scale Markov Game Approach to Dynamic Protection of Interdependent Infrastructure Networks

The integration of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) into critical infrastructures (CIs) improves its connectivity and functionalities yet also brings cyber threats. It is thus essential to understand the risk of ICTs on CIs holistically as a cyber-physical system and design efficient security hardening mechanisms. To this end, we capture the system behaviors of the CIs under malicious attacks and the protection strategies by a zero-sum game. We further propose a computationally tractable approximation for large-scale networks which builds on the factored graph that exploits the dependency structure of the nodes of CIs and the approximate dynamic programming tools for stochastic Markov games. This work focuses on a localized information structure and the single-controller game solvable by linear programming. Numerical results illustrate the proper tradeoff of the approximation accuracy and computation complexity in the new design paradigm and show the proactive security at the time of unanticipated attacks.