An Abstraction of Cyber Inception: Using a Modified Version of Battleship to Study Strategies and Behavior of Deception

Inception has been proposed as a means to protect our cyber domain. In order to fully take advantage of this strategy we must first understand deception from the human point of view, because it is the human cyber attacker that plans and orchestrates cyberattacks. Moreover, although various deceptive tactics are addressed in the cyber-security literature, it appears they are categorized more from the standpoint of technology than from their behavioral origins. In order to better understand the interplay between attacker and defender, and associated cues of deception, we abstracted the cyber deception task. Participants played a modified version of Battleship either face-to-face or with a divider. Deception was significantly higher in the divider condition. Additionally, participants used patterns of deception analogous to cyber attackers and defenders such as blatant lies, diversion, and honeypots. An array of behavioral cues were also observed when participants lied and included variations in tone of voice, less eye contact, lower response time, and other physical indicators. Implications and future projects are discussed.