A stochastic evolutionary coalition game model of secure and dependable virtual service in Sensor-Cloud

Various intrusion detection systems (IDSs) have been proposed in recent years to provide safe and reliable services in cloud computing. However, few of them have considered the existence of service attackers who can adapt their attacking strategies to the topology-varying environment and service providers’ strategies. In this paper, we investigate the security and dependability mechanism when service providers are facing service attacks of software and hardware, and propose a stochastic evolutionary coalition game (SECG) framework for secure and reliable defenses in virtual sensor services. At each stage of the game, service providers observe the resource availability, the quality of service (QoS), and the attackers’ strategies from cloud monitoring systems (CMSs) and IDSs. According to these observations, they will decide how evolutionary coalitions should be dynamically formed for reliable virtual-sensor-service composites to deliver data and how to adaptively defend in the face of uncertain attack strategies. Using the evolutionary coalition game, virtual-sensor-service nodes can form a reliable service composite by a reliability update function. With the Markov chain constructed, virtual-sensor-service nodes can gradually learn the optimal strategy and evolutionary coalition structure through the minimax-Q learning, which maximizes the expected sum of discounted payoffs defined as QoS for virtual-sensor-service composites. The proposed SECG strategy in the virtual-sensor-service attack-defense game is shown to achieve much better performance than strategies obtained from the evolutionary coalition game or stochastic game, which only maximizes each stage's payoff and optimizes a defense strategy of stochastic evolutionary, since it successfully accommodates the environment dynamics and the strategic behavior of the service attackers.