Open Access

ARTICLE

Social Engineering Attack-Defense Strategies Based on Reinforcement Learning

Rundong Yang^1,*, Kangfeng Zheng¹, Xiujuan Wang², Bin Wu¹, Chunhua Wu¹

1 School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China
2 School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China

* Corresponding Author: Rundong Yang. Email:

Computer Systems Science and Engineering 2023, 47(2), 2153-2170. https://doi.org/10.32604/csse.2023.038917

Received 04 January 2023; Accepted 20 April 2023; Issue published 28 July 2023

Abstract

Social engineering attacks are considered one of the most hazardous cyberattacks in cybersecurity, as human vulnerabilities are often the weakest link in the entire network. Such vulnerabilities are becoming increasingly susceptible to network security risks. Addressing the social engineering attack defense problem has been the focus of many studies. However, two main challenges hinder its successful resolution. Firstly, the vulnerabilities in social engineering attacks are unique due to multistage attacks, leading to incorrect social engineering defense strategies. Secondly, social engineering attacks are real-time, and the defense strategy algorithms based on gaming or reinforcement learning are too complex to make rapid decisions. This paper proposes a multiattribute quantitative incentive method based on human vulnerability and an improved Q-learning (IQL) reinforcement learning method on human vulnerability attributes. The proposed algorithm aims to address the two main challenges in social engineering attack defense by using a multiattribute incentive method based on human vulnerability to determine the optimal defense strategy. Furthermore, the IQL reinforcement learning method facilitates rapid decision-making during real-time attacks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional Q-learning (QL) and deep Q-network (DQN) approaches in terms of time efficiency, taking 9.1% and 19.4% less time, respectively. Moreover, the proposed algorithm effectively addresses the non-uniformity of vulnerabilities in social engineering attacks and provides a reliable defense strategy based on human vulnerability attributes. This study contributes to advancing social engineering attack defense by introducing an effective and efficient method for addressing the vulnerabilities of human factors in the cybersecurity domain.

---

Keywords

---