Assessing the Influence of Different Types of Probing on Adversarial Decision-Making in a Deception Game

Deception, which includes leading cyber-attackers astray with false information, has shown to be an effective method of thwarting cyber-attacks. There has been little investigation of the effect of probing action costs on adversarial decision-making, despite earlier studies on deception in cybersecurity focusing primarily on variables like network size and the percentage of honeypots utilized in games. Understanding human decision-making when prompted with choices of various costs is essential in many areas such as in cyber security. In this paper, we will use a deception game (DG) to examine different costs of probing on adversarial decisions. To achieve this we utilized an IBLT model and a delayed feedback mechanism to mimic knowledge of human actions. Our results were taken from an even split of deception and no deception to compare each influence. It was concluded that probing was slightly taken less as the cost of probing increased. The proportion of attacks stayed relatively the same as the cost of probing increased. Although a constant cost led to a slight decrease in attacks. Overall, our results concluded that the different probing costs do not have an impact on the proportion of attacks whereas it had a slightly noticeable impact on the proportion of probing.