The Power of Initial Investigation in Audit Games

Ren Liu, Weiran Shen

Abstract:

Audit games are an important variant of the Stackelberg security game, a widely studied game-theoretic model over the past years. It has been acknowledged by many researchers that a pre-audit phase can notably enhance the audit's efficiency by informing and directing the following audit procedures.

In this paper, we model the above process with a two-stage audit game. The game encompasses two stages: an investigation stage where the auditor gathers information about potential policy breaches, and an audit stage where the auditor allocates the audit resources based on the investigation results.

We first show that it is NP-hard to compute the auditor's optimal two-stage audit strategy. To circumvent the complexity issue, we consider a restricted strategy space, and show that the optimal strategy in the restricted space can be determined by solving a polynomial number of convex optimization problems. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effect of introducing the initial investigation stage and our algorithm. Our experiments show that even a small budget for the initial investigations can significantly enhance the defender's utility.