9th Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS)
June 7-8, 2010
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

CALL FOR PAPERS

http://weis2010.econinfosec.org/cfp.html

IMPORTANT DATES

    Submissions due: February 22, 2010
    Notification of acceptance: April 2, 2010
    Workshop: June 7-8, 2010

Information security continues to grow in importance, as threats
proliferate, privacy erodes, and attackers find new sources of value.
Yet the security of information systems depends on more than just 
technology.  Good security requires an understanding of the incentives 
and tradeoffs inherent to the behavior of systems and organizations. As 
society’s dependence on information technology has deepened, policy 
makers, including the President of the United States, have taken 
notice.  Now more than ever, careful research is needed to accurately 
characterize threats and countermeasures, in both the public and 
private sectors.

The Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) is the 
leading forum for interdisciplinary scholarship on information 
security, combining expertise from the fields of economics, social 
science, business, law, policy and computer science. Prior workshops 
have explored the role of incentives between attackers and defenders, 
identified market failures dogging Internet security, and assessed 
investments in cyber-defense. This workshop will build on past efforts 
using empirical and analytic tools to not only understand threats, but 
also strengthen security through novel evaluations of available 
solutions. How should information risk be modeled given the constraints 
of rare incidence and high interdependence? How do individuals’ and 
organizations’ perceptions of privacy and security color their decision 
making?  How can we move towards a more secure information 
infrastructure and code base while accounting for the incentives of 
stakeholders? 

We encourage economists, computer scientists, business school
researchers, legal scholars, security and privacy specialists, as well 
as industry experts to submit their research and attend the workshop. 
Suggested topics include (but are not limited to) empirical and 
theoretical studies of:

- Optimal investment in information security
- Online crime (including botnets, phishing and spam)
- Models and analysis of online crime 
- Risk management and cyberinsurance 
- Security standards and regulation 
- Cybersecurity policy 
- Privacy, confidentiality and anonymity 
- Behavioral security and privacy 
- Security models and metrics
- Psychology of risk and security
- Vulnerability discovery, disclosure, and patching
- Cyberwar strategy and game theory
- Incentives for information sharing and cooperation

We highlight two key areas of particular focus for this year’s 
workshop.  First, we encourage submissions that consider the design and 
evaluation of policy solutions for improving information security.  
Second, given the importance of data-driven decision making, we 
encourage submissions with empirical components.  A selection of papers 
accepted to this workshop will appear in an edited volume designed to 
help policy makers, managers, researchers and practitioners better 
understand the information security landscape.

Papers should be submitted online by 23:59 PST on Monday, February 22, 
2010, preferably in PDF format.  Submitted manuscripts should represent 
significant and novel research contributions. Please note that WEIS has 
no formal formatting guidelines. Previous contributors spanned fields 
from economics and psychology to computer science and law, each with 
different norms and expectations about manuscript length and 
formatting. Advisable rules of thumb include: using past WEIS accepted 
papers as templates and adhering to your community's publication 
standards.

WEIS is co-located with the 11th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, 
June 9-11, 2010.  

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University 
Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge 
Rainer Böhme, ICSI Berkeley 
Jean Camp, Indiana University 
Huseyin Cavusoglu, University of Texas at Dallas 
Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon University 
Benjamin Edelman, Harvard Business School 
Allan Friedman, Harvard University (General Chair) 
Neil Gandal, Tel Aviv University 
Dan Geer, In-Q-Tel 
Lawrence Gordon, University of Maryland 
Jens Grossklags, Princeton University 
Thorsten Holz, Technical University of Vienna 
M. Eric Johnson, Dartmouth Tuck School of Business 
Martin Loeb, University of Maryland 
Tyler Moore, Harvard University (Program Chair) 
Andrew Odlyzko, University of Minnesota 
David Pym, HP Labs and University of Bath 
Brent Rowe, RTI 
Stuart Schechter, Microsoft Research 
Bruce Schneier, BT Counterpane 
Rick Sullivan, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City 
Latanya Sweeney, Carnegie Mellon University 
Rahul Telang, Carnegie Mellon University 
Catherine Tucker, MIT 
Michel van Eeten, Delft University of Technology 
Hal Varian, Google and UC Berkeley 
Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School