A Survey of Game Theoretic Methods for Cyber Security

Cyber security has been heavily studied in both industry and academia, but the traditional security technology is still facing unprecedented challenges in the background of massive and complicated network traffic. Game theory as a mathematical model of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers has great potential to improve cyber security. This paper describes a focused literature survey of game theoretic methods for cyber security applications. The methods are classified according to their security application scenarios, and we also present their advantages and limitations respectively. Then we discuss the difficulties and challenges confronting researchers, and in addition, we propose some directions for further research on game theory as applied to cyber security from both the mathematics perspective and security perspective.