Randomized Methods in Game Theory with Applications to Network Security Abstract: This talk addresses the solution of large zero-sum matrix games using randomized methods. We formalize a procedure -- termed the Sampled Security Policy (SSP) algorithm -- by which a player can compute policies that, with high probability, guarantees a certain level of performance against an adversary engaged in a random exploration of the game's decision tree. The SSP Algorithm has applications to numerous combinatorial games in which decision makers are faced with a number of possible options that increases exponentially with the size of the problem. In this talk we focus on an applications in the area of network security, where system administrators need to consider multi-stage, multi-host attacks that may consist of long sequences of actions by an attacker in their attempt to circumvent the system defenses. In practice, this leads to policy spaces that grow exponentially with the number of stages involved in an attack. Bio: João P. Hespanha received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and applied science from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut in 1998. From 1999 to 2001, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2002, where he currently holds a Professor position with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prof. Hespanha is Director for the Center for Control, Dynamical-systems, and Computation (CCDC), Vice-Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a member of the Executive Committee for the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB). Dr. Hespanha is the recipient of the Yale University’s Henry Prentiss Becton Graduate Prize for exceptional achievement in research in Engineering and Applied Science, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2005 best paper award at the 2nd Int. Conf. on Intelligent Sensing and Information Processing, the 2005 Automatica Theory/Methodology best paper prize, the 2006 George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award, and the 2009 Ruberti Young Researcher Prize. Dr. Hespanha is a Fellow of the IEEE and an IEEE distinguished lecturer since 2007. His current research interests include hybrid and switched systems; the modeling and control of communication networks; distributed control over communication networks (also known as networked control systems); the use of vision in feedback control; and stochastic modeling in biology.
