CCSS: Collaborative Research: Quickest Threat Detection in Adversarial Sensor Networks

With the recent rapid development of wireless communication and advanced sensing technology, rich and complex sequential high-dimensional data are made available for a wide range of threat detection applications, e.g., intrusion detection, anomaly detection, fake news detection, and false data injection detection. However, the reliance on wireless communication and the sparsely spatial distribution of these networked sensors make them vulnerable to adversarial attacks, such as measurement manipulation and false data injection.

Moreover, threats are oftentimes caused by human factors, and thus any attempt to improve the performance of threat detection algorithms may result in a dual effort to devise more powerful counter-threat-detection techniques that leave less evidence. In this project, a game-theoretic framework will be developed to investigate the ultimate limits of the dual efforts for quickest threat detection in adversarial networked environments.

The investigators will co-organize special sessions at conferences, workshops, and symposia on quickest change detection to disseminate the research outcomes of this project, formalize far-reaching research directions, identify new challenges in this emerging area, stimulate the development of original research ideas, and foster interdisciplinary collaborations. The investigators are committed to broadening the participation of under-represented minorities and women both among the graduate and undergraduate students in STEM education.

The investigators will enrich their current courses and further develop new courses on topics related to this project.

The project is expected to make new contributions to quickest change detection, adversarial learning, sequential analysis, and game theory. A systematic methodology of developing Nash equilibrium strategies for quickest threat detection in networked adversarial environments will be developed, and their fundamental performance limits at the Nash equilibrium will be theoretically characterized.

This project consists of three thrusts. The first thrust focuses on one data stream under adversarial attacks with temporal structure. The second thrust focuses on the case with multiple independent data streams. The third thrust focuses on networks with graphic correlation structure.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.