A game theoretic approach to cooperative intrusion detection

Yunchuan Guo, Han Zhang, Lingcui Zhang, Liang Fang, Fenghua Li

Abstract: Highlights•Considering bounded rationality of users and dynamics of cooperative intrusion detection, we formulate the incentive mechanism for cooperative detection as an evolutionary game. We design a budget-assignment mechanism to encourage nodes to timely cooperate and achieve the Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) in our evolutionary game.•Considering the reputation of cooperators, we propose a punishment-appeal mechanism to decrease the reputation score of malicious nodes and prevent the proposed incentive mechanism from be abused. Theoretically, we prove that in our scheme, no rational node is willing to act as a malicious behavior.•We design an ESS-based algorithm and carry out the simulation. The results show that our proposed strategy can efficiently incentivize non-malicious nodes to participate in cooperation and prevent malicious nodes from abusing our incentive.