Establishing evolutionary game models for CYBer security information EXchange (CYBEX)

The initiative to protect critical resources against cyber attacks requires security investments complemented with a collaborative sharing effort from every organization. A CYBersecurity information EXchange (CYBEX) framework is required to facilitate cyber-threat intelligence (CTI) sharing among the organizations to abate the impact of cyber attacks. In this research, we present an evolutionary game theoretic framework to investigate the economic benefits of cybersecurity information sharing and analyze the impacts and consequences of not participating in the game. By using micro-economic theory as substrate, we model this framework as human-society inspired evolutionary game among the organizations and investigate the implications of information sharing. Using our proposed dynamic cost adaptation scheme and distributed learning heuristic, organizations are induced toward adopting the evolutionary stable strategy of participating in the sharing framework. We also extend the evolutionary analysis to understand sharing nature of participants in a heterogeneous information exchange environment.