Bayesian hypergame approach to equilibrium stability and robustness in moving target defense

Abstract

We investigate the equilibrium stability and robustness in a class of moving target defense problems, in which players have both incomplete information and asymmetric cognition. We first establish a Bayesian Stackelberg game model for incomplete information and then employ a hypergame reformulation to address asymmetric cognition. With the core concept of the hyper Bayesian Nash equilibrium (HBNE), a condition for achieving both the strategic and cognitive stability in equilibria can be realized by solving linear equations. Moreover, to deal with players' underlying perturbed knowledge, we study the equilibrium robustness by presenting a condition of robust HBNE under the given configuration. Experiments evaluate our theoretical results.