Attacker–defender model against quantal response adversaries for cyber security in logistics management: An introductory study

Interest in cyber security in logistics and supply chain management has grown, but this has not been matched by academic research. Increasingly, the logistics industry is implementing the Internet-of-Things (IoT), namely sensors and actuators, to collect data, process orders and deliver materials and/or products. This automation reduces human errors in processing orders and enhances the efficiency of order deliveries. However, this can be interrupted by attacks from cyberspace, especially from the Internet. In this paper, we propose a novel attacker–defender model against a quantal response (QR) adversary to protect critical assets by considering the defending budget and the asset dependency. Each asset in the solution is represented by its security level indicating its desirability for being protected. Due to the non-convexity of our model, we propose a Method of Successive Average heuristic with randomised initial conditions (MSAR) to obtain a promising solution.