An integrated model of human cyber behavior

Abstract

Agent-based models are commonplace in the simulation-based analysis of cyber security. But as useful as it is to model, for example, adversarial tactics in a simulated cyber attack or realistic traffic in a study of network vulnerability, it is increasingly clear that human error is one of the greatest threats to cyber security. From this perspective, the salient features of behavior are those of an agent making decisions about how to use a system, rather than an agent acting as an adversary or as a “chat bot” which functions merely as a statistical message generator. In this paper, we describe work to model a human dimension of the cyber operator, a user subject to different motivations that lead directly to differences in cyber behavior which, ultimately, lead to differences in the risk of suffering a “drive-by” malware infection.