# A Survey of Game Theoretic Approaches to Modelling Decision-Making in Information Warfare Scenarios
## 5 Research Findings, Challenges, and Opportunities
### Coverage of Information Warfare Categories
In the context of information warfare, however, it is critical to identify the types of entity that carried out the attacks (enemy) and the victim of the attack. This is because different actors may have different intents, behaviors, goals and priorities. Clearly specifying the types of actors and their intent in a game will be useful to correctly map the game into an appropriate information warfare category. This can ease the decision makers to find a game that matches the considered information warfare/cyber-crime scenario. Furthermore, by specifying the types of actors of the game, there are several critical aspects that can be considered. These include whether the player may have access to critical information resource, whether they have the potential to deceive information, the amount of damage they may potentially cause, and several other characteristics. Such aspects may also affect the belief of the player(s) to choose a certain strategy in the game. In contrast to hacker warfare category, we found that there is only a few studies conducted in other information warfare categories, particularly in the domain of psychological warfare. Psychological warfare relates to the use of information warfare against the human mind. While a number of computational models drawing upon psychological literature have recently been proposed, their applications to game theory and information warfare domain have not been widely explored. An interesting future research direction in this category includes the use of higher fidelity game players/entities (such as in the areas of motivation and risk preference modelling) to model the actors in information warfare scenarios in a more realistic manner. We also identified that there remains a paucity of research within the category of command and control warfare. We identified that only a few studies have considered the use of game theory to address the case where the opponent directly attacks the command and control infrastructure. There thus remains a great potential to further develop game theoretic approach for such a scenario. As discussed in the previous sections, a player in a command and control warfare scenario attacks the command and communications infrastructure of its opponent to avoid further military action. This requires the knowledge of how the opponent communicates. In such a scenario, an enemy can launch a single attack/multiple attacks either simultaneously or sequentially. For future work, such a scenario can be modelled in the form of a non-cooperative static game (when the players act simultaneously) or in a non-cooperative dynamic multi-stage game or sequential game (when it is assumed that the players alternate moves). Another aspect to consider is that the impact after an attack has been launched can be massive (e.g., an attack that completely destroy the flow of information between the decision-makers and the troops). This may results in a change of objective from the opponent perspective after an attack has been launched. One possible alternative to deal with this problem is to take into account a new evaluation function at some stages of the game [38]. Recent advances in network technology allow information to be shared widely across the network which increases the risks for cyber-attacks not only to the targeted entity but also to other interacting entities in the system. In this context the use of shared decision making to model the cooperation/negotiation between multiple defenders against common enemies is another interesting area open for exploration. Interdependent security (IDS) games [89] are one example of games that model interdependencies between decision makers when dealing with security related investments.