When Information Improves Information Security

We investigate a mixed economy of an individual rational expert and several na¨ıve near-sighted agents in the context of security decision making. Agents select between three canonical security actions to navigate the complex security risks of weakest-link, best shot and total effort interdependencies. We further study the impact of two information conditions on agents’ choices. We provide a detailed overview of a methodology to effectively determine and compare strategies and payoffs between the different regimes. To analyze the impact of the different information conditions we propose a new formalization. We define the price of uncertainty as the ratio of the expected payoff in the complete information environment to the payoff in the incomplete information environment. ∗ This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under ITR award ANI-0331659 (100x100), and the Army Research Office through contract number DAAD19-02-1-0389. Jens Grossklags’ work is als...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: FC
• Authors: Jens Grossklags, Benjamin Johnson, Nicolas Christin
• Keywords: Canonical Security Actions, Cryptology, FC 2010, Information Conditions, Na¨ıve Near-sighted Agents