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This paper introduces a novel approach, Decision Theory-guided Deep Reinforcement Learning (DT-guided DRL), to address the inherent cold start problem in DRL. By integrating decision theory principles, DT-guided DRL enhances agents' initial performance and robustness in complex environments, enabling more efficient and reliable convergence during learning. Our investigation encompasses two primary problem contexts: the cart pole and maze navigation challenges. Experimental results demonstrate that the integration of decision theory not only facilitates effective initial guidance for DRL agents but also promotes a more structured and informed exploration strategy, particularly in environments characterized by large and intricate state spaces. The results of experiment demonstrate that DT-guided DRL can provide significantly higher rewards compared to regular DRL. Specifically, during the initial phase of training, the DT-guided DRL yields up to an 184% increase in accumulated reward. Moreover, even after reaching convergence, it maintains a superior performance, ending with up to 53% more reward than standard DRL in large maze problems. DT-guided DRL represents an advancement in mitigating a fundamental challenge of DRL by leveraging functions informed by human (designer) knowledge, setting a foundation for further research in this promising interdisciplinary domain.

An in-depth understanding of uncertainty is the first step to making effective decisions under uncertainty. Deep/machine learning (ML/DL) has been hugely leveraged to solve complex problems involved with processing high-dimensional data. However, reasoning and quantifying different types of uncertainties to achieve effective decision-making have been much less explored in ML/DL than in other Artificial Intelligence (AI) domains. In particular, belief/evidence theories have been studied in KRR since the 1960s to reason and measure uncertainties to enhance decision-making effectiveness. We found that only a few studies have leveraged the mature uncertainty research in belief/evidence theories in ML/DL to tackle complex problems under different types of uncertainty. In this survey paper, we discuss several popular belief theories and their core ideas dealing with uncertainty causes and types and quantifying them, along with the discussions of their applicability in ML/DL. In addition, we discuss three main approaches that leverage belief theories in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), including Evidential DNNs, Fuzzy DNNs, and Rough DNNs, in terms of their uncertainty causes, types, and quantification methods along with their applicability in diverse problem domains. Based on our in-depth survey, we discuss insights, lessons learned, limitations of the current state-of-the-art bridging belief theories and ML/DL, and finally, future research directions., Comment: First four authors contributed equally

Defensive deception is a promising approach for cyber defense. Via defensive deception, the defender can anticipate attacker actions; it can mislead or lure attacker, or hide real resources. Although defensive deception is increasingly popular in the research community, there has not been a systematic investigation of its key components, the underlying principles, and its tradeoffs in various problem settings. This survey paper focuses on defensive deception research centered on game theory and machine learning, since these are prominent families of artificial intelligence approaches that are widely employed in defensive deception. This paper brings forth insights, lessons, and limitations from prior work. It closes with an outline of some research directions to tackle major gaps in current defensive deception research., Comment: 37 pages, 184 citations

Defensive deception techniques have emerged as a promising proactive defense mechanism to mislead an attacker and thereby achieve attack failure. However, most game-theoretic defensive deception approaches have assumed that players maintain consistent views under uncertainty. They do not consider players' possible, subjective beliefs formed due to asymmetric information given to them. In this work, we formulate a hypergame between an attacker and a defender where they can interpret the same game differently and accordingly choose their best strategy based on their respective beliefs. This gives a chance for defensive deception strategies to manipulate an attacker's belief, which is the key to the attacker's decision making. We consider advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks, which perform multiple attacks in the stages of the cyber kill chain where both the attacker and the defender aim to select optimal strategies based on their beliefs. Through extensive simulation experiments, we demonstrated how effectively the defender can leverage defensive deception techniques while dealing with multi-staged APT attacks in a hypergame in which the imperfect information is reflected based on perceived uncertainty, cost, and expected utilities of both attacker and defender, the system lifetime (i.e., mean time to security failure), and improved false positive rates in detecting attackers., Comment: Main paper: 12 pages, 8 figures. Appendix: 7 pages, 17 figures

Centrality metrics have been used in various networks, such as communication, social, biological, geographic, or contact networks. In particular, they have been used in order to study and analyze targeted attack behaviors and investigated their effect on network resilience. Although a rich volume of centrality metrics has been developed for decades, a limited set of centrality metrics have been commonly in use. This paper aims to introduce various existing centrality metrics and discuss their applicabilities and performance based on the results obtained from extensive simulation experiments to encourage their use in solving various computing and engineering problems in networks., Comment: Main paper: 36 pages, 2 figures. Appendix 23 pages,45 figures

Diversity-based security approaches have been studied for several decades since the 1970's. The concept of diversity-by-design emerged in the 1980's and, since then, diversity-based system design research has been explored to build more secure and dependable systems. In this work, we are particularly interested in providing an in-depth, comprehensive survey of existing diversity-based approaches, insights, and future work directions for those who want to conduct research on developing secure and dependable cyber-physical systems (CPSs) using diversity as a system design feature. To be specific, this survey paper provides: (i) The common concept of diversity based on a multidisciplinary study of diversity from nine different fields along with the historical evolution of diversity-by-design for security; (ii) The design principles of diversity-based approaches; (iii) The key benefits and caveats of using diversity-by-design; (iv) The key concerns of CPS environments in introducing diversity-by-design; (v) A variety of existing diversity-based approaches based on five different classifications; (vi) The types of attacks mitigated by existing diversity-based approaches; (vii) The overall trends of evaluation methodologies used in diversity-based approaches, in terms of metrics, datasets, and testbeds; and (viii) The insights, lessons, and gaps identified from this extensive survey.