Learning to Defend by Attacking (and Vice-Versa): Transfer of Learning
  in Cybersecurity Games
Tyler Malloy Cleotilde Gonzalez
Designing cyber defense systems to account for cognitive biases in human
decision making has demonstrated significant success in improving performance
against human attackers. However, much of the attention in this area has
focused on relatively simple accounts of biases in human attackers, and little
is known about adversarial behavior or how defenses could be improved by
disrupting attacker's behavior. In this work, we present a novel model of human
decision-making inspired by the cognitive faculties of Instance-Based Learning
Theory, Theory of Mind, and Transfer of Learning. This model functions by
learning from both roles in a security scenario: defender and attacker, and by
making predictions of the opponent's beliefs, intentions, and actions. The
proposed model can better defend against attacks from a wide range of opponents
compared to alternatives that attempt to perform optimally without accounting
for human biases. Additionally, the proposed model performs better against a
range of human-like behavior by explicitly modeling human transfer of learning,
which has not yet been applied to cyber defense scenarios. Results from
simulation experiments demonstrate the potential usefulness of cognitively
inspired models of agents trained in attack and defense roles and how these
insights could potentially be used in real-world cybersecurity.