Investments in information security are contingent on the expected benefits and costs of their deployment. Yet, it is difficult to quantify those trade-offs: uncertainties about attackers' skills and motivations, systems' dependability, and the consequences of security failures are heightened by intangible considerations - such as individual perceptions of the value of security. In recent years, growing attention has been directed towards the application to information security of economic models for the evaluation of complex trade-offs under risk and uncertainty. This economics of information security has offered mathematical models of returns on security investments and behavioral models of users' decision making; it has detailed regulatory solutions to cyber-security issues; and it has clarified the challenges of improving everyday security and privacy.
The DIMACS Workshop on Information Security Economics aims at enlarging the interest in this area by bringing together researchers already engaged in the field with other scientists and investigators in disciplines such as economics, business, statistics, and computer science. We encourage researchers and industry experts to submit manuscripts with original work to the Workshop; we especially encourage collaborative and interdisciplinary research from authors in multiple fields.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) empirical and theoretical works on the economics of:
Questions about the workshop may be addressed to: dimacs@infosecon.net.
Organizers
Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University, acquisti@andrew.cmu.edu
Jean Camp, Indiana University, ljean@ljean.com
Attendance at this workshop is open to the public, by registration (subject to space constraints). Talks were selected from submissions (deadline passed).