Influence of attacker's target recognition ability on defense strategy in homogeneous parallel systems

The article considers defense resource allocation in a system exposed to external intentional attack. The defender distributes its resource between deploying redundant elements and their protection from attacks. The attacker observes all the elements and tries to detect the unprotected elements. All the detected unprotected elements are destroyed with negligible effort. The attacker then distributes its effort evenly among all of the undetected elements or among elements from a chosen subset of undetected elements. The vulnerability of each element is determined by an attacker–defender contest success function depending on the resources allocated to protection and attack efforts and on the contest intensity. The expected damage caused by the attack is evaluated as system unsupplied demand. The article studies the influence of the unprotected elements’ detection probability on the optimal resource distribution.