The Economics of Information Security: A Survey and Open Questions

The economics of information security has recently become a thriving and fastmoving discipline. As distributed systems are assembled from machines belonging to principals with divergent interests, we find incentives becoming as important to dependability as technical design is. The new field provides valuable insights not just into ‘security’ topics such as privacy, bugs, spam, and phishing, but into more general areas such as system dependability (the design of peer-to-peer systems and the optimal balance of effort by programmers and testers), policy (particularly digital rights management) and more general security questions (such as law-enforcement strategy).