Beyond Best Response: Quantal Stackelberg Deception as Insurance Against Attacker Misspecification

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 9 Aug 2026] Beyond Best Response: Quantal Stackelberg Deception as Insurance Against Attacker Misspecification Asif Rahman, Md. Abu Sayed, Ahmed Ann Noor Ryen, Ahmed Hemida, Charles A. Kamhoua, Christopher Kiekintveld Stackelberg Security Games (SSG) assume that an attacker observes the defender's strategy and chooses the target that maximizes their expected utility perfectly. In most realistic applications this is not plausible, and in the case of cyber deception (e.g., using decoys) the purpose of the game is to induce uncertainty and mistakes. Quantal response is a common way to represent noise and mistakes in decision-making; here it replaces perfect best-response with a logit choice with rationality parameter λ and results in a generalized Quantal Stackelberg Equilibrium (QSE), which recovers the classical solution exactly as λ→∞ . We conduct a deeper analysis of how QSE can function as a generalized form of insurance against a variety of forms of model specification error/uncertainty; our analysis shows that QSE provides a practical way to address the important role of tie-breaking rules and model uncertainty in SSG from both a theoretical and practical perspective. We conduct an empirical evaluation in a cybersecurity case study with two networks and real vulnerabilities drawn from CVE and scored using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). QSE beats Stackelberg in realized defender utility spanning 144 scenarios with specification errors and 25 parameter configurations, with gains of 46\% to 175\% showing a substantial advantage in a wide variety of realistic cases. Comments: Accepted at Gamesec 2026 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2608.08865 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.08865v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.08865 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Asif Rahman [view email] [v1] Sun, 9 Aug 2026 19:03:18 UTC (201 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)