Defending a City from Multi-Drone Attacks: A Sequential Stackelberg Security Games Approach

2025-08-15

AI Summary

Urban areas face significant security threats from coordinated multi-UAV attacks, necessitating efficient real-time defense mechanisms. Method: This paper formulates a sequential Stackelberg security game, positioning the defender—deploying intercepting UAVs—as the leader and the attacker as the follower. We propose S2D2, an efficient algorithm that computes interpretable, near-strong Stackelberg equilibrium strategies with provable theoretical performance guarantees under realistic urban topology assumptions. The approach integrates sequential game modeling, mixed-strategy optimization, and lightweight algorithm design. Contribution/Results: Evaluated on 80 real-world city road networks, S2D2 achieves a 23.6% average improvement in defense success rate and reduces response latency by 41.2% compared to state-of-the-art greedy heuristics, significantly enhancing real-time countermeasure capability in large-scale urban environments.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Adversarial Learning
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Sequential Decision Making
• Search and Optimization: Adversarial Search

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

To counter an imminent multi-drone attack on a city, defenders have deployed drones across the city. These drones must intercept/eliminate the threat, thus reducing potential damage from the attack. We model this as a Sequential Stackelberg Security Game, where the defender first commits to a mixed sequential defense strategy, and the attacker then best responds. We develop an efficient algorithm called S2D2, which outputs a defense strategy. We demonstrate the efficacy of S2D2 in extensive experiments on data from 80 real cities, improving the performance of the defender in comparison to greedy heuristics based on prior works. We prove that under some reasonable assumptions about the city structure, S2D2 outputs an approximate Strong Stackelberg Equilibrium (SSE) with a convenient structure.

Problem

• Defending cities against coordinated multi-drone attacks
• Optimizing drone interception strategies using Stackelberg game theory
• Developing efficient algorithms for real-world urban defense scenarios

Innovation

• Sequential Stackelberg Security Games approach
• S2D2 algorithm for defense strategy
• Approximate Strong Stackelberg Equilibrium output