Economics of Security and Privacy

1. week
Introduction to system security, concepts, actors and security solutions. Detailed discussion of economics issues, motivation for the participants and misaligned incentives.

2. week
Tutorial on microeconomics concepts: game theory primer, normal- and extensive-form games, game solutions and equilibrium concepts, the Prisoner's Dilemma, externalities, the Tragedy of the Commons

3. week
Interdependent security, risks and dependency, total effort, weakest link and best shot models, security investment of selfish participants and equilibrium solutions

4. week
Misaligned incentives of the participants, ISPs involvement in mitigating security risks, detailed assessment of intervention power for various participants, user motivation and its failure, asymmetric information and lemon markets

5. week
Generic model of security investments: the Gordon-Loeb model and its follow-up work, iterated security investments and investment options

6. week
The problem of spam and related issues, motivation for spammers, economics solutions for software flaws

7. week
Measuring the underground economy, spammers, carders and exploits

8. week
Information sharing models, incentives and impact to reveal security breaches, information sharing for software vulnerabilities: vulnerability markets, cooperation against phishing

9. week
Economics of privacy and anonymity, privacy issues and threats, behavioral economics point of view, user privacy evaluation, price discrimination and usability, privacy policies

10. week
Economics of privacy in social networks, privacy of Facebook, privacy policies of social networks, anonymizing private data

11. week
Adoption of security technologies, case studies of SSH and PGP, digital rights management and trusted computing

12. week
Cyber-insurance for security and privacy risk management, issues and solutions, market models, asymmetric information and correlated incidents

13-14. week
Advanced topics and additional discussion