Information Leakage Games

Introduction

● In QIF, randomization can be very useful to obfuscate the link between secrets and
observables
● The defender (system designer) is usually probabilistic, because this reduces the
information leakage
● The attacker, however, is mostly passive in most of the literature
● The main thesis here is that an attacker can also benefit from randomization, as it
makes her unpredictable

● This work considers a scenario in which both attacker and defender can influence the
system
● The attacker’s strategy is to maximize the leakage, whereas the defender wants to
keep the system as safe as possible
● Game theory provides a framework to model this scenario
● The use of randomization is captured by a mixed strategy, and the interplay between
attacker and defender can be modeled as optimal strategies and Nash Equilibrium

● This scenario, however, cannot be fully captured by typical game theory models
● Namely, the strategy of using randomization by the defender to reduce the leakage
has no counterpart
● In standard game theory, a mixed strategy is the expectation of the utility of pure
strategies, which makes it an affine function on players’ distributions
● Indeed, this strategy for the defender makes his utility function convex, and not affine
● Hence, a new kind of games is proposed, called Information Leakage Games

Game Theory: Some Key Concepts

● In a game of two players, each player has a set of possible actions that he can
perform
● Each action can lead to a gain or a loss, depending on the action of both players
● The payoff’s value to each player is evaluated using a utility function

● Players may choose actions deterministically or probabilistically

● A pure strategy is a deterministic choice of actions (d, a), where d is the action of the
defender and a is the action of the attacker
● The defender’s utility is denoted by ud(d, a), while the attacker’s is denoted by ua(d,
a)

● A mixed strategy is a probabilistic choice of actions (δ, α), where δ is probability

distribution on the defender’s actions and α is a distribution on attacker’s actions
● A mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium is a profile (δ*, α*) such that δ* is the best
response for α* and vice versa
● If δ* and α* are point distributions, then this profile becomes a pure-strategy Nash
equilibrium
 ● A game is zero-sum if, for any pair of actions (d, a), the defender’s loss is equivalent
to the attacker’s gain, that is, ud(d, a) = - ua(d, a)
● The Nash equilibrium corresponds to the solution of the minimax problem:

Leakage Games vs. Standard Game Theory

● As mentioned before, information leakage games differ from standard approaches to

game theory
● For instance, this framework fails to meet the von Neumann and Morgenstern
axioms
● Let σ, σ’ and σ’’ be mixed strategies. The independence axiom states that

● Since we are using vulnerability as a utility function, it’s clear that it doesn’t satisfy
independence, because a combination of two leaky “channels” can produce a
“non-leaky” one

● Another key difference is that, in standard game theory, the utility of a mixed strategy
is the expectation of the utilities of pure strategies
● When applying vulnerability as a utility function, however, it becomes convex on the
distribution of the defender

● This difference in utility functions also does not allow us to model our scenario as
convex-concave games
● In this model, the set of actions is continuous, yielding a convex utility for one player
and concave for the other
● The first reason as to why it fails is related to once again the usage of utility as the
expectation of mixed strategies, which we showed does not work for vulnerability as
the utility
● The second reason is that pure actions may not always be realizable: in leakage
games, the defender has an advantage of knowing the result of his own random
choice, which would be lost in a convex-concave representation

Convexity of Vulnerability

● As previously mentioned, the posterior vulnerability is a convex function of the

strategy of the defender
● Each strategy is modeled as a channel, and the choice of which strategy to use can
be seen as a composition of channels
● This implies that the vulnerability of the composition of channels is smaller than
or equal to the composition of their vulnerabilities:
 ● In other words, if we know which channel (strategy) was used, we obviously know
more information than if we have to guess
● The von Neuman’s minimax theorem ensures the existence of a saddle point for the
above equation, which is a Nash equilibrium

Computing Equilibria of Information Leakage Games

● The goal of this work is to solve information leakage games

● In these games, the success of an attack a and a defense d is measure by a
vulnerability V
● The combination (d, a) is a pure strategy and is associated with a channel Cda
● The attacker knows his own action a, but we assume that the defender’s choice d is
hidden
● Hence, the utility of a mixed strategy (δ, α) is:

● The above equation is convex on δ and affine on α, hence we can prove that an
equilibrium exists

● The goal of this work is then to solve a convex-concave optimization problem

● More formally, it wants to compute 1) a δ* such that (δ*, α*) is a Nash Equilibrium
(because it optimizes the defense) and 2) the utility V(δ*, α*) (because it gives an
upper bound on the effectiveness of an attack when δ* is applied)
● For 1, The proposed method is to solve the minimax problem:

● The reason for this choice is that the solution to this problem is guaranteed to be an
equilibrium, and it can be solved with projected subgradient method
● For 2, it suffices to compute the Bayes vulnerability, since it is widely used:

Conclusions

● This work introduced information leakage games, in which a defender and an

attacker have opposing goals in optimizing the amount of information leakage in a
system
● The main difference of these games that separate them from standard game theory
is that the utility function of a mixed strategy is convex on the distribution of
the defender’s actions rather than the expected value of the utilities of the pure
strategies
● Despite this difference, most important properties of game theory, such as Nash
equilibrium, still hold
Information Leakage Games

Introduction

Throughout our studies in QIF we were able to verify that probabilities have a
common application in our systems as a strategy from the defender in order to increase the
level of security of a system. Intuitively one can think that randomizing the output of a system
will make it’s inputs probabilistically correlated with the final state, decreasing it’s leakage.
That being said the same intuition doesn’t apply to the attacker, since she’s aiming for the
greatest information leakage possible it seems reasonable that one of her attitudes should
be the best and therefore should be the chosen one by a rational adversary.
 Granted there are some cases outside of game theory where one could see the
benefits of having an adversary that can influence and be influenced by the system, opening
up the possibility of changing the strategy after one or more iterations of the system.
Nevertheless even then it is hard to model cases where the best course of action in any of
those iterations would be a probabilistic choice by the attacker, and that’s where some game
theory concepts, such as “mixed strategies, optimal strategies and Nash Equilibrium” clash
with the most used QIF concepts, such as “Bayes Vulnerability, Shannon entropy, guessing
entropy and g-vulnerability”.

Developing a specific framework to model what will be called “information leakage

games” we may face non-trivial conclusions which are only possible by careful analysis on
the intersection between those two areas, for example we should be able to prove that the
utility on this framework is a convex function of the mixed strategy of the defender, which is
not how it is defined on classic game theory. As well as Nash equilibrium being achieved by
a mixed strategy, proving that in QIF optimal strategies may be probabilistic.

Preliminaries

Along with QIF’s notation there are some baselines that need to be established since
we are working with game theory. We are modeling a two player game in which by taking an
action each player receives a payoff, modeled by a utility function. The possible game
actions are finite, the players are rational and they have complete knowledge about the
possible actions the other player can take, furthermore they take those actions
simultaneously, unlike a game of chess, for example, where players take actions in turns and
wait for the other to move raising the necessity of a time penalization. Players may choose
an action deterministically or probabilistically, a mixed strategy is a probabilistic choice of
specific actions. Given that the maximum utility of player A occurs when he is able to
minimize the utility of player B and vice-versa we have Nash equilibriums as situations
where there are no strategy changes that any player could take in order to raise his or her
own utility. In other words, when players A and B have chosen the best response possible
for each other's actions.

A quick review of our framework used for QIF analysis: we work with secrets, a
secret is some information the defender has and the adversary is trying to obtain, all the
information the adversary already has about the secret is considered a prior. The
vulnerability of the secret is a parallel with what the utility function for the attacker is, the
vulnerability is a continuous and convex function.

Channels are the result of crossing inputs and outputs, and display the probability of
every output given a specific input, a prior and a channel with it’s outputs and inputs induce
a joint distribution, observing the outputs of the prior into the channel updates the attacker
knowledge with a collection of posterior distributions, each occurring with its specific
probability. The posterior vulnerability of a channel is the vulnerability after the attacker
observes the posterior distribution, and the information leakage is given by the difference
between the attacker's prior knowledge and her posterior knowledge.

Examples

The “two millionaires problem” is a problem where two “millionaires” (Alice and
Bernard) want to discover who is the wealthiest, in sight of this purpose Bernard sends a
message informing a third party (Charles) about his wealth and Charles will send a message
to Alice asking for her wealth. Since both millionaires don’t want to disclose exactly the
amount of money they have and Charles will send Bernard back a message which will have
different answers depending on who is found to have informed Charles the most amount of
money. Bernard is worried that Alice is going to be able to intercept Jeeves message and
therefore be able to figure out who among them sent the greatest value to Charles.

Assuming that Alice has access to only the message Charles sends back to Bernard
and that she is able to change her response to Charles it’s clear that it’s in the best interest
of the Defense making the strategy probabilistic, minimizing the leakage when Alice
inevitably sees the outcome of the processing. Here we assume that, since Bernard and
Charles are working together, they know which program Charles ran, and as the adversary
Alice only knows the set of possible strategies that Charles can choose from. Therefore we
can picture Charles choosing from two antagonist strategies, one that analyzes if the amount
of money Alice imputed is bigger than the amount Bernard imputed, and one that does
precisely the opposite.

For each combination of possible actions we can form a Channel, therefore for each
possible combination of inputs and for each program chosen we may have a different
possible channel from the attacker point of view. Then we have that two of those channels
completely reveal all the information, and two of the channels do not reveal any information.

For each channel if we take its Bayes vulnerability we come across an utility table,
since Bayes vulnerability measures the probability the adversary has of correctly guessing
the secret in one try. It’s easy to see that the posterior Bayes vulnerabilities of C00 and C11
are 1 while the posterior Bayes vulnerabilities of C01 and C10 are ½.

However, the attacker may not know the exact probability in which the defender will
choose either one or other strategy, but she does know which of the actions she picked. So
instead of this representation we can use the Vulnerability of the system given the value
picked by the attacker but dependent on the probability used from the Defender for picking
either strategy.

Assuming that the defender now chooses a with a=0 probability of q and a=1 with a
probability of 1-q we can find a utility function that is both affine in q and in p. Applying game
theory we have then that the optimal strategy is (p∗ , q∗ ) = (1/2, 1/2).
 We can also analyze another situation where the programs the defender is using are
slightly different, for example the binary sum program, in this stance we have a significant
alteration on our original channels.

Applying the same logic as the previous one here, we will find that in spite of our
choice of Q not making a significant difference for the resulting optimal strategy we can still
find the optimal P for any value of Q, hence (p∗ , q∗ ) = (1/2, q∗ ) for any value of q ∗.

Leakage games vs standard game theory models

The von Neuman and Morgensen work on utility of mixed strategies resulted in some
properties for mixed strategies that are mandatory when they are equal to the expected
utilities of the corresponding player pure strategies. Since that’s not the case when we talk
about leakage games they should not be able to comply with all the properties, which is
intuitive when you think about independence. Two leaky channels can make together a
non-leaky channel, this breaks the traditional approach on the study of leakage games.

Another trick one may fall into when trying to analyze leakage games is analyzing
with the concept of risk-averse or convex-concave games to perceive the convexity of the
distribution on the defender. But both of these approaches fail, since when dealing with
risk-averse players is convex on the payoff of an outcome of the game, which is not the case
for leakage games. As for convex-concave games, they fail to represent the advantage
defenders have in the game, the decision tha Charles made in the previous example for
instance.