Shall we collaborate? A model to analyse the benefits of information sharing

Abstract: Nowadays, both the amount of cyberattacks and their sophistication have considerably increased, and their prevention is of concern of most of organizations. Cooperation by means of information sharing is a promising strategy to address this problem, but unfortunately it poses many challenges. Indeed, looking for a win-win environment is not straightforward and organizations are not properly motivated to share information. This work presents a model to analyse the benefits and drawbacks of information sharing among organizations that presents a certain level of dependency. The proposed model applies functional dependency network analysis to emulate attacks propagation and game theory for information sharing management. We present a simulation framework implementing the model that allows for testing different sharing strategies under several network and attack settings. Experiments using simulated environments show how the proposed model provides insights on which conditions and scenarios are beneficial for information sharing.