Adversary-as-Agents: A Co-Evolutionary Agent-Based Threat-Modelling Framework for Wireless and Mobile Networks

Abstract

Threat modelling for wireless and mobile networks is dominated by static, catalogue-driven methods that fix the adversary in advance and never ask whether an attack is feasible against the defence actually deployed; agent-based resilience studies share this limitation, optimising a defender against an exogenous threat profile. We instead endogenise the adversary. Network entities run a decentralised consensus agent-based model (DC-ABM) defence, while an adaptive adversary population co-evolves by allocating a bounded attack budget across vulnerability-mode partitions. The equilibrium is a rankable, feasibility-grounded threat model expressed through three structural metrics: degeneracy-weighted path robustness, trust-weighted functional substitutability, and robust degeneracy. We prove that the DC-ABM defence contracts below its Byzantine breakdown threshold and that the induced adversary payoff is convex against that threshold, so the emergent attack drives a subset of partitions to breakdown in priority order. We further prove that this attack concentrates on the least substitutable partitions, that severity diverges as the induced corrupted-mass fraction approaches breakdown, and that operators can shrink the attack surface at deployment time along a closed-form connectivity-substitutability exchange rate.