ABSTRACT: Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are crucial security mechanisms widely deployed for critical network protection. However, conventional IDSs become incompetent due to the rapid growth in network size and the sophistication of large scale attacks. To mitigate this problem, Collaborative IDSs (CIDSs) have been proposed in literature. In CIDSs, a number of IDSs exchange their intrusion alerts and other relevant data so as to achieve better intrusion detection performance. Nevertheless, the required information exchange may result in privacy leakage, especially when these IDSs belong to different self-interested organizations. In order to obtain a quantitative understanding of the fundamental tradeoff between the intrusion detection accuracy and the organizations' privacy, a repeated two-layer single-leader multi-follower game is proposed in this work. Based on our game-theoretic analysis, we are able to derive the expected behaviors of both the attacker and the IDSs and obtain the utility-privacy tradeoff curve. In addition, the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE) is proved and an asynchronous dynamic update algorithm is proposed to compute the optimal collaboration strategies of IDSs. Finally, simulation results are shown to validate the analysis.

Richeng Jin received the B.S. degree in information and communication engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 2015. He is currently a PhD student in electrical and computer engineering from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA. His research interests are in the areas of security and privacy in networks and game theory.

Xiaofan He received the B.S. degree in electronics and information engineering from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 2008, the M.A.Sc. degree in electrical and computer engineering from McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada, in 2011, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA, in 2015. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering with Lamar University, TX, USA. His research interests are in the areas of security and privacy in information systems and networks, game theory and learning theory, and detection and estimation.

Huaiyu Dai received the B.E. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1996 and 1998, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, in 2002. He was with Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Holmdel, NJ, USA, in 2000, and with AT&T Labs-Research, Middletown, NJ, USA, in 2001. He is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with North Carolina State University, Raleigh. His research interests are in the general areas of and communication systems and networks, advanced signal processing for digital communications, communication theory and information theory. His current research focuses on networked information processing and crosslayer design in wireless net972 works, cognitive radio networks, network security, and associated information973 theoretic and computation-theoretic analysis.

Dr. Dai has served as an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communi975 cations, Signal Processing, and Wireless Communications. Currently, he is an Area Editor in charge of wireless communications for IEEE TRANS977 ACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS. He has co-edited two special issues of EURASIP journals on distributed signal processing techniques for wireless sensor networks, and on multiuser information theory and related applications, respectively. He has co-chaired the Signal Processing for Communications Symposium of the IEEE Globecom 2013, the Communications Theory Sym982 posium of IEEE ICC 2014, and the Wireless Communications Symposium of IEEE Globecom 2014.