A game-theoretic model and analysis of data exchange protocols for Internet of Things in clouds

Big data, Internet of things (IoT), and cloud computing have been recognized a family of technologies for a connected world. Besides hailed hope for the future, there are also challenges to security due to complexity and unpredictability of the Internet, clouds, and data. One of the challenges is information and data exchange, for example, identifying untrustworthy cloud users and analyzing abnormal user behavior during information exchange. This paper addresses exchange mechanism, which is a useful theoretic basis to make secure electronic commerce and electronic business transactions possible. To ensure and verify the property of fairness, a crucial property of exchange mechanism, this paper proposes a specific model for behavior analysis based on the extensive game with imperfect information. Rationality and fairness properties are built in the corresponding game and the game tree. To verify the properties, a tree analysis method is proposed, and a linear time algorithm is given. As a case study, some flaws of the ASW protocol are found.