Results 1 -
4 of
4
SUSTAINABILITY IN INFORMATION STEWARDSHIP: TIME PREFERENCES, EXTERNALITIES, AND SOCIAL CO-ORDINATION
"... ABSTRACT. The concept of stewardship in environmental economics is an established tool for environmental and natural resource management and the mitigation of risk from climate change. Similar concepts are well-established in accounting and management. Despite the ubiquity of the concept of stewards ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 2 (1 self)
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
ABSTRACT. The concept of stewardship in environmental economics is an established tool for environmental and natural resource management and the mitigation of risk from climate change. Similar concepts are well-established in accounting and management. Despite the ubiquity of the concept of stewardship, there is no generally accepted definition. We define the information steward as the agent/institution who enhances the system’s resilience and sustainability, by maintaining and extending the life of its nominal operational capacity. Unlike individual agents who are not able to value systemic losses, the steward, whose function is the viability of the system as a whole, values such damages that degrade the system at a higher rate by adopting a lower discount rate. In the presence of deliberate attacks that degrade the information used/kept in the system, individual agents ’ defensive expenditure is always lower that the expenditure undertaken under instructions from the information steward. The ability of the steward to mobilize the totality of agents reduces the number of attackers, increasing the systems sustainability under a variety of technological considerations. The resulting configuration of defensive expenditure, although higher than the level that individual agents would have chosen based on their own valuation of their expected losses, ensures that the overall probability of successful attacks falls, significantly
Is Public Co-Ordination of Investment in Information Security Desirable
"... Abstract This paper provides for the presentation, in an integrated manner, of a sequence of results addressing the consequences of the presence of an information steward in an ecosystem under attack and establishes the appropriate defensive investment responses, thus allowing for a cohesive unders ..."
Abstract
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
Abstract This paper provides for the presentation, in an integrated manner, of a sequence of results addressing the consequences of the presence of an information steward in an ecosystem under attack and establishes the appropriate defensive investment responses, thus allowing for a cohesive understanding of the nature of the information steward in a variety of attack contexts. We determine the level of investment in information security and attacking intensity when agents react in a non-coordinated manner and compare them to the case of the system's coordinated response undertaken under the guidance of a steward. We show that only in the most well-designed institutional set-up the presence of the well-informed steward provides for an increase of the system's resilience to attacks. In the case in which both the information available to the steward and its policy instruments are curtailed, coordinated policy responses yield no additional benefits to individual agents and in some case they actually compared unfavourably to atomistic responses. The system's sustainability does improve in the presence of a steward, which deters attackers and reduces the numbers and intensity of attacks. In most cases, the resulting investment expenditure undertaken by the agents in the ecosystem exceeds its Pareto efficient magnitude.
Summary: Mapping Interconnection in the Internet: Colocation, Connectivity and Congestion
"... As the global Internet expands to satisfy the demands and expectations of an ever-increasing frac-tion of the world's population, profound changes are occurring in its interconnection structure, trafc dynamics, and the economic and political power of different players in the ecosystem. These ch ..."
Abstract
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
As the global Internet expands to satisfy the demands and expectations of an ever-increasing frac-tion of the world's population, profound changes are occurring in its interconnection structure, trafc dynamics, and the economic and political power of different players in the ecosystem. These changes not only impact network engineering and operations, but also present broader challenges for technology investment, future network design, public policy, and scientic study of the Inter-net itself. And yet, from both scientic and policy perspectives, the evolving ecosystem is largely uncharted territory. In particular, two related transformations of the ecosystem motivate our inquiry: the emer-gence of Internet exchanges (IXes) as anchor points in the mesh of interconnection, and content providers and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) as major sources of trafc owing into the In-ternet. By some accounts over half the trafc volume in North America now comes from just two content distributors (Youtube and Netix). This shift constitutes the rise of a new kind of hier-archy in the ecosystem, bringing fundamentally new constraints on existing players who need to manage trafc on their networks to minimize congestion. Measurement challenges limit our cur-rent capability to describe and understand these dynamics, but evidence of trouble has increased
1Modeling Malicious Domain Name Take-down Dynamics: Why eCrime Pays
"... Abstract—Domain names drive the ubiquitous use of the Internet. Criminals and adversaries also use domain names for their enterprise. Defenders compete to remove or block such malicious domains. This is a complicated space on the Internet to measure comprehensively, as the malicious actors attempt t ..."
Abstract
- Add to MetaCart
Abstract—Domain names drive the ubiquitous use of the Internet. Criminals and adversaries also use domain names for their enterprise. Defenders compete to remove or block such malicious domains. This is a complicated space on the Internet to measure comprehensively, as the malicious actors attempt to hide, the defenders do not like to share data or methods, and what data is public is not consistently formatted. This paper derives an ad hoc model of this competition on large, decentralized networks using a modification of Lanchester’s equations for combat. The model is applied to what is known of the current state of malicious domain activity on the Internet. The model aligns with currently published research, and provides a more comprehensive description of possible strategies and limitations based on the general dynamics of the model. When taken with the economic realities and phys-ical laws to which the Internet is bound, the model demonstrates that the current approach to removing malicious domain names is unsustainable and destined for obsolescence. However, there are technical, policy, and legal modifications to the current approach that would be effective, such as preemptively populating watch lists, limits on a registrant’s registrations, and international co-operation. The results indicate that the defenders should not expect to eliminate or significantly reduce malicious domain name usage without employing new digital tactics and deploying new rules in the physical world. I.
