Game Theory for Network Security

As networks become ubiquitous in people´s lives, users depend on networks a lot for sufficient communication and convenient information access. However, networks suffer from security issues. Network security becomes a challenging topic since numerous new network attacks have appeared increasingly sophisticated and caused vast loss to network resources. Game theoretic approaches have been introduced as a useful tool to handle those tricky network attacks. In this paper, we review the existing game-theory based solutions for network security problems, classifying their application scenarios under two categories, attack-defense analysis and security measurement. Moreover, we present a brief view of the game models in those solutions and summarize them into two categories, cooperative game models and non-cooperative game models with the latter category consisting of subcategories. In addition to the introduction to the state of the art, we discuss the limitations of those game theoretic approaches and propose future research directions.