  As an effective method to protect the daily access to sensitive data against
malicious attacks, the audit mechanism has been widely deployed in various
practical fields. In order to examine security vulnerabilities and prevent the
leakage of sensitive data in a timely manner, the database logging system
usually employs an online signaling scheme to issue an alert when suspicious
access is detected. Defenders can audit alerts to reduce potential damage. This
interaction process between a defender and an attacker can be modeled as an
audit game. In previous studies, it was found that sending real-time signals in
the audit game to warn visitors can improve the benefits of the defender.
However, the previous approaches usually assume perfect information of the
attacker, or simply concentrate on the utility of the defender. In this paper,
we introduce a brand-new zero-determinant (ZD) strategy to study the sequential
audit game with online signaling, which empowers the defender to unilaterally
control the utility of visitors when accessing sensitive data. In addition, an
optimization scheme based on the ZD strategy is designed to effectively
maximize the utility difference between the defender and the attacker.
Extensive simulation results show that our proposed scheme enhances the
security management and control capabilities of the defender to better handle
different access requests and safeguard the system security in a cost-efficient
manner.
