A Game-Theoretic Approach for Quantification of Strategic Behaviors in Digital Forensic Readiness

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) face disproportionately high risks from Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), which often evade traditional cybersecurity measures. Existing frameworks catalogue adversary tactics and defensive solutions but provide limited quantitative guidance for allocating limited resources under uncertainty, a challenge amplified by the growing use of AI in both offensive operations and digital forensics. This paper proposes a game-theoretic model for improving digital forensic readiness (DFR) in SMEs. The approach integrates the MITRE ATT&CK and D3FEND frameworks to map APT behaviors to defensive countermeasures and defines 32 custom DFR metrics, weighted using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), to derive utility functions for both attackers and defenders. The main analysis considers a non-zero-sum attacker–defender bimatrix game and yields a single Nash equilibrium in which the attacker concentrates on Impact-oriented tactics and the defender on Detect-focused controls. In a synthetic calibration across ten organizational profiles, the framework achieves a median readiness improvement of 18.0% (95% confidence interval: 16.3% to 19.7%) relative to pre-framework baselines, with targeted improvements in logging and forensic preservation typically reducing key attacker utility components by around 15–30%. A zero-sum variant of the game is also analyzed as a robustness check and exhibits consistent tactical themes, but all policy conclusions are drawn from the empirical non-zero-sum model. Despite relying on expert-driven AHP weights and synthetic profiles, the framework offers SMEs actionable, equilibrium-informed guidance for strengthening forensic preparedness against advanced cyber threats.