Ensuring the security of networked systems is a significant problem, considering the susceptibility of modern infrastructures and technologies to adversarial interference. A central component of this problem is how defensive resources should be allocated to mitigate the severity of potential attacks on the system. In this paper, we consider this in the context of a General Lotto game, where a defender and attacker deploys resources on the nodes of a network, and the objective is to secure as many links as possible. The defender secures a link only if it out-competes the attacker on both of its associated nodes. For bipartite networks, we completely characterize equilibrium payoffs and strategies for both the defender and attacker. Surprisingly, the resulting payoffs are the same for any bipartite graph. On arbitrary network structures, we provide lower and upper bounds on the defender's max-min value. Notably, the equilibrium payoff from bipartite networks serves as the lower bound. These results suggest that more connected networks are easier to defend against attacks. We confirm these findings with simulations that compute deterministic allocation strategies on large random networks. This also highlights the importance of randomization in the equilibrium strategies.

翻译：确保网络化系统的安全性是一个重要问题，因为现代基础设施和技术容易受到对抗性干扰。该问题的核心在于如何分配防御资源，以减轻潜在攻击对系统造成的严重性。本文在General Lotto博弈框架下对该问题进行了研究，其中防御方与攻击方将资源部署在网络节点上，目标是最大化保护的链路数量。只有当防御方在某个链路关联的两个节点上的资源均超过攻击方时，该链路才能被成功保护。对于二分网络，我们完整刻画了防御方与攻击方的均衡收益与策略。令人惊讶的是，任何二分图结构的均衡收益均相同。对于任意网络结构，我们给出了防御方极大极小值的上下界，其中二分网络的均衡收益构成了下界。这些结果表明，连接更紧密的网络更易于抵御攻击。我们通过在大型随机网络上计算确定性分配策略的仿真验证了上述结论，同时也凸显了均衡策略中随机化的重要性。