A Markov Game Model for Evaluating Cybersecurity Attacks on Cloud

Cyber threats have become increasingly sophisticated and prevalent, posing significant risks to cloud environments. Designing a robust threat model is essential to effectively defend cyber threats in the cloud. Modeling cyber threats using game theory can help the defender to select optimal strategies against the attacks and can help the defender to make effective decisions to mitigate the attack’s impact. In this paper, we model a cyber threat strategy in which the attackers can utilize various methods to launch attack effectively. Then, we present a Markov game model to evaluate the efficiency of different attacker’s strategies against cyber defense from attacker’s perspective in a cloud system scenario. We then conduct experiments based on CVSS metrics to quantify the outcomes of this zero-sum game model for both attack and defense strategies such as the shortest attack path, random, and greedy attack.