An attack-defense game based reliability analysis approach for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks play an important role in daily life and have been applied in diverse fields. In practice, malware tries to infect sensor nodes, while wireless sensor network prevents from attacking. This article establishes a new attack–defense game based on Stackelberg game. In this game, malware selects its strategy of attacking first, and then wireless sensor network makes decision after observing the action of malware. This game considers the situation in which malware is more dominant than wireless sensor network. Then this game is solved and an equilibrium solution is calculated, which is the best strategy for malware and wireless sensor network to maximize their payoffs. With infection probability and defense probability, mean time to failure of a sensor node is computed and is used to analyze the reliability of wireless sensor network. The experiments show the influence of true-positive rate and false-positive rate on the equilibrium solution of game and the reliability of wireless sensor network. Finally, the proposed method is compared with the existing method based on a simultaneous game.