Intelligence and impact contests in defending a single object with imperfect false targets

Introducing false targets is a common approach to protect important facilities. In this paper we assume that the defender has deployed a single object that can be destroyed by the attacker and deployed several false targets in order to misinform the attacker. The false targets are imperfect and can be detected by the attacker independently. In order to detect the false targets the attacker allocates part of his budget into intelligence actions. The optimal resource distribution between target identification/disinformation and attack/ protection efforts is studied for the case of constrained defense and attack resources.