Attack-Defense Trees and Two-Player Binary Zero-Sum Extensive Form Games Are Equivalent

Attack-defense trees are used to describe security weaknesses of a system and possible countermeasures. In this paper, the connection between attack-defense trees and game theory is made explicit. We show that attack-defense trees and binary zero-sum two-player extensive form game have equivalent expressive power when considering satisfiability, in the sense that they can be converted into each other while preserving their outcome and their internal structure.