Game theoretic modeling of security and trust relationship in cyberspace

Today, online network services have evolved as the highest-emergent medium, enabling various online activities to be lucrative. However, these lucrative activities also bring new forms of privacy threats to the community. In a reliable e-business service, users should be able to trust the providers of the service to protect their customers' privacy. The service providers should not risk the personal and private information about their customers in cyberspace. There is an economic gain for a business provider when users trust the service provider. Despite those benefits, cyber security concern is the main reason some large organization may go bankrupted. Unfortunately, attackers may attempt to breach a provider's database and expose customers' private information. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a game theoretic framework for security and trust relationship in cyberspace for users, service providers, and attackers. Mathematical proofs and evaluations support our model. Service providers may use the model to see how important and dissuasive against attackers is when investing in cybersecurity. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.