[Time]:  14:30-15:30, June 7, 2012 (Thursday) 
  
[Place]: Room 510, Shunde Building 
  
[Topic]: Critical Infrastructure Protection against Intentional Attacks 
  
[Speaker]: Dr. Chi Zhang, Department of Systems Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology 
  
[Host]: Dr. Zhizhong Li 
  
[Abstract]: One of the main threats to networked critical infrastructures is from intentional attackers, who are resourceful and inventive. For developing affordable protection strategies for these infrastructures, this talk introduces game theoretic approaches to study the interaction between protector and rational attackers. This talk firstly focuses on the detection of an infrastructure’s vulnerabilities, understood in this research as the critical components that the attacker targets to maximize the damage to an infrastructure. To do so, two optimization frameworks for critical components detection are presented under two different conditions of information availability: complete and incomplete information. Secondly, based on vulnerabilities detection, the protector’s two information disclosing policies, namely disclosure and secrecy, are studied respectively in two types of games: two-stage game and simultaneous game. Compared with traditional research, the proposed approaches are more realistic since they can be applied to the protection of critical infrastructures with both large scale and general topologies. Moreover, incomplete information and mixed strategies are respectively considered in the two-stage game and the simultaneous game.