An Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Framework for Cyber-threat Information Sharing

Charles Kamhoua

27Feb
14:00 27th February 2015 ( week 6, Hilary Term 2015 )
Tony Hoare Room, Robert Hooke Building

The initiative to protect against future cyber crimes requires a collaborative effort from all types of agencies spanning industry, academia, federal institutions, and military agencies. Therefore, an information exchange framework is required to facilitate breach/patch related information sharing among the participants (firms) to combat cyber attacks. In this paper, we formulate a distributed cybersecurity information sharing game, where the firms (players) can choose independently to share or not. We analyze the game from an evolutionary game point-of- view and determine the conditions under which the players’ evolutionary stability can be achieved. From the analysis, we derive a population threshold which can be exploited by the Cybersecurity Information Exchange (CYBEX) to self-enforce the firms’ participation in the CYBEX framework and reinforce them for sharing security information. We present a distributed learning heuristic to attain the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) for various conditions. The numerical and simulation results corroborate the theoretical analysis presented to achieve ESS.

Speaker bio

Charles A. Kamhoua received his B.S. in Electronic from the University of Douala (ENSET), Cameroon in 1999, and the M.S. in Telecommunication and Networking and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Florida International University in 2008 and 2011 respectively. In 2011, he joined the Cyber Assurance Branch of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Rome, New York, as a National Academies Postdoctoral Fellow and became a Research Electronics Engineer in 2012. Prior to joining AFRL, he was an educator for more than 10 years.

Dr. Kamhoua is the Principal Investigator of the AFRL in-house basic research project, Survivability Through Optimizing Resilient Mechanisms (STORM) funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). He is leading a team of more than 10 researchers including military, summer faculties, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students from multiple universities across the United States. He was selected to be Lead Technical Advisor of the first Department of Defense (DoD) Cyber Security Center of Excellence for Historically Black Colleges and Universities/Minority Institutions (HBCU/MI), a $5 Million project supported by the Air Force, Army, Navy, NSA and the Pentagon. He collaborate with the Assured Cloud Computing-University Center of Excellence (ACC-UCoE) which is a joint effort of the AFRL Information Directorate, AFOSR, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign performing state of the art research in cloud security. His managerial and technical expertise is sought from the highest levels within DoD as evidenced by multiple tech transition reviews of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at the Pentagon.

His current research interests cover the application of game theory and mechanism design to cyber security and survivability, with over 40 technical publications in prestigious journals and International conferences. He participated in multiple research visits in the United States and abroad to maintain technological excellence in cyber security research relevant to warfighter and civilian needs. His research was presented in multiple national and international conferences and to the Air Force Scientific Advisory board. He is a reviewer of multiple journals and serves on the technical program committees of several international conferences. He was selected to be a Chair of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD).

Dr. Kamhoua has won some of the most prestigious awards including five Air Force Notable Achievement Awards, the 2015 AFOSR Windows on the World Visiting Research Fellowship at Oxford University, UK, an AFOSR basic research award of $645K, the 2015 Black Engineer of the Year Award (BEYA) –Special Recognition, the 2015 National Society of Black Engineer (NSBE) Golden Torch Award – Pioneer of the Year, a National Academies Postdoctoral Fellowship award, a Best Paper Award at the 2013 International Symposium on Foundations of Open Source Intelligence and Security Informatics (FOSINT-SI 2013), a 2011 National Science Foundation (NSF) PIRE award at Fluminense Federal University, Brazil, and the 2008 FAEDS teacher award. He is an advisor for the National Research Council, a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Florida International University alumni association, and the National Society of Black Engineer (NSBE).