Game theoretic risk analysis of security threats (Q951220)

Risk management is quite an important problem for every living creature. Hence studying risk management using all possible approaches is a worthy problem. This book combines game and reliability theories to study attacker-defender models. Both are considered to be intelligent and adaptive. Chapter 1 (Bier and Azaiez) is an introduction. Chapter 2 (by Guikema) is an excellent review of combining reliability and game theories to model attack-defence situations. The adequacy of game theory is critically reviewed. Also non-game theoretic approaches are presented. (The name of D. Arce is missing in the reference of Sandler and Arce 2003). Chapter 3 (by Levitin) considers an attack-defence case when the attacker attempts to maximize the expected damage to a complex multi-state series-parallel system. The defender on the other hand uses separation, protection and false targets to reduce the attack risk. Chapter 4 (by Hausken et al.) considers defence against both natural disasters and terrorism. A variety of simultaneous and sequential decision situations is considered. Chapter 5 (by Azaiez) considers the important case of incomplete information in modeling attacker-defender strategies. The attacker has only partial information about the survivability of the targeted system. Chapter 6 (by Gaver et al.) considers the case of detecting and neutralizing a terrorist in a population. There are two sources of errors, namely false identification of a nonhostile individual and failure to identify a hostile one. Chapter 7 (by Pate-Cornell et al.) uses game theory and probabilistic risk analysis to study the links between the actions of terrorists and governments. Chapter 8 (by Cox) surveys recent developments in designing resilient telecommunication networks. Such networks should be designed to provide enough flexibility, redundancy and rapid recovery against deliberate attacks. The focus is on network topology and traffic routing to achieve resilience. Chapter 9 (by Kanturska et al.) considers improving transportation reliability via multi-path routing. Both defender-attacker and defender-attacker-defender game models are used. The visibility of protection is also discussed. An application to the city of London is given. This book has many advantages: The topic of the book is quite important. Combining game and reliability theories is a distinguished idea. Many attempts to make the models realistic are given. Approaches other than game theory are mentioned. An application to the city of London is given in chapter 9. Reviewer's remark: In this reviewer's opinion the book lacks the two points: The first is that it should be stated clearly that terrorism cannot be solved by security means only. Integrated approaches e.g. economic, social and security measures have to be used. The second point is the lack of the biologically motivated approach to risk management. It is known that the immune system faces attacks by adaptive antigens (viruses, bacteria, worms etc.) for millions of years and has succeeded in eradicating or containing them. I hope that such an approach will be included in future editions of this valuable book.