[EIS] CFP: Workshop on the Economics of Information Security 2006

[Tyler Moore]

                The Fifth Workshop on the Economics of
                   Information Security (WEIS 2006)

                http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~twm29/WEIS06/

                   University of Cambridge, England
                            June 26-28, 2006

                     C A L L   F O R   P A P E R S

                       Submissions due: March 20

Do we spend enough on hunting down bad guys on the Internet? Do we not
spend enough? Or do we spend too much?

One of the most exciting and rapidly-growing fields at the boundary
between technology and the social sciences is the economics of
information security.  Many security and privacy failures are not
purely technical: for example, the person best placed to protect a
system may be poorly motivated if the costs of system failure fall on
others.  Many pressing problems, such as spam, are unlikely to be
solved by purely technical means, as they have economic and policy
aspects too.  Building dependable systems also raises questions such as
open versus closed systems, the pricing of vulnerabilities and the
frequency of patching.  The 'economics of bugs' are of growing
importance to both vendors and users.

Now that both crime and conflict are becoming virtualised, many of the
lessons learned by information security economists may travel to other
security applications, such as law enforcement.  Law enforcement
concerns such as traffic analysis impact on information security costs
and practices in turn.  For these and other reasons, the confluence
between information security and economics is of growing importance.

Information security mechanisms are increasingly used not just to
protect against malicious attacks, but also to protect monopolies,
differentiate products and segment markets.  There are deep questions
about the economics and politics of DRM, of locking printers to the
maker's cartridges, and of practices such as region coding.

Original research papers are sought for the Fifth Workshop on the
Economics of Information Security.  Topics of interest include the
dependability of open source and free software, the interaction of
networks with crime and conflict, the economics of digital rights
management and trusted computing, liability and insurance, reputation,
privacy, risk perception, the economics of trust, the return on
security investment, and economic perspectives on spam.

Important dates
* Submissions due: March 20, 2006
* Notification of acceptance: April 24, 2006
* Workshop: June 26-28, 2006

Papers should be sent by noon GMT on Monday, March 20, 2006 to
weis-06 at cl.cam.ac.uk.  For more information please visit
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~twm29/WEIS06/

WEIS 2006 is co-located with the Sixth Workshop on Privacy Enhancing
Technologies (PET), to be held June 28-30, 2006.

Program committee:

Chair
Ross Anderson (Cambridge)

Committee
Alessandro Acquisti (Carnegie Mellon)
Jean Camp (University of Indiana)
Huseyin Cavusoglu (Tulane University)
Larry Gordon (University of Maryland)
Marty Loeb (University of Maryland)
Andrew Odlyzko (University of Minnesota)
Stuart Schechter (MIT Lincoln Laboratory)
Bruce Schneier (Counterpane)
Rahul Telang (Carnegie Mellon)
Hal Varian (UC Berkeley)