Optimal Cost-Based Cyber Insurance Policy Management for Mobile Services

This paper introduces a cyber insurance policy management for the mobile networks in which if a mobile user agrees to purchase an insurance policy from an insurer, the loss of the mobile user, i.e., the insured, will be covered by the insurance policy when the risks happen. To protect mobile users from cyber attacks, the insurer can deploy security protection solutions, e.g., anti-virus software or personal firewall, to the insureds, thereby reducing the risks for mobile users. However, when the solutions are deployed, they will incur a certain cost to the insurer. Therefore, we propose a stochastic optimization based on the reserve state of the insurer and the number of active mobile users to determine whether the protection solutions should be deployed or not to maximize the revenue for the insurer. The performance evaluation reveals that the optimal policy can achieve significantly higher revenue than those of baseline schemes for the insurer. Alternatively, the coalitional game is studied to share the reward among the insurers, and we show that the insurers can gain higher individual rewards through the cooperation.