Optimal Consumer-Centric Delay-Efficient Security Management in Multi-Agent Networks: A Game and Mechanism Design Theoretic Approach

• Main Author: Schlake, Farimehr
• Other Authors: Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: Virginia Tech 2017
• Subjects: Incentive Compatibility; Dominant Strategy; IPsec; QoS; ATM; Delay; Security Protocol; Performance; Optimization; Mechanism Design Theory; Game Theory; Bayesian Games
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/77362; http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-04122012-094602/

The main aspiration behind the contributions of this research work is the achievement of simultaneuos delay-efficiency, autonomy, and security through innovative protocol design to address complex real-life problems. To achieve this, we take a holistic approach. We apply theoretical mathematical modeling implementing implications of social-economic behavioral characteristics to propose a cross-layer network security protocol. We further complement this approach by a layer-specific focus with implementations at two lower OSI layers. For the cross-layer design, we suggest the use of game and mechanism design theories. We design a network-wide consumer-centric and delay-efficient security protocol, DSIC-S. It induces a Dominant Strategy Incentive Compatible equilibrium among all rational and selfish nodes. We prove it is network-wide socially desirable and Pareto optimal. We address resource management and delay-efficiency through synergy of several design aspects. We propose a scenario-based security model with different levels. Furthermore, we design a valuation system to integrate the caused delay in selection of security algorithms at each node without consumer's knowledge of the actual delays. We achieve this by incorporating the consumer's valuation system, in the calculation of the credit transfers through the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) payments with Clarke's pivotal rule. As the utmost significant contribution of this work, we solve the revelation theorem's problem of misrepresentation of agents' private information in mechanism design theory through the proposed design. We design an incentive model and incorporate the valuations in the incentives. The simulations validate the theoretical results. They prove the significance of this model and among others show the correlation of the credit transfers to actual delays and security valuations. In the layer-specific approach for the network-layer, we implement the DSIC-S protocol to extend current IPsec and IKEv2 protocols. IPsec-O and IKEv2-O inherit the strong properties of DSIC-S through the proposed extensions. Furthermore, we propose yet another layer-specific protocol, the SME_Q, for the datalink layer based on ATM. We develop an extensive simulation software, SMEQSIM, to simulate ATM security negotiations. We simulate the proposed protocol in a comprehensive real-life ATM network and prove the significance of this research work. === Ph. D.