The 18th Annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2019)

Boston, Massachusetts, June 3-4, 2019

Information security and privacy continue to grow in importance, as threats proliferate, privacy erodes, and attackers find new sources of value. Yet the security of information systems and the privacy offered by them depends on more than just technology. Each requires an understanding of the incentives and trade-offs inherent to the behavior of people and organizations. As society’s dependence on information technology has deepened, policy-makers have taken notice. Now more than ever, careful research is needed to characterize accurately 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 and privacy, 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 of information systems, identified market failures surrounding Internet security, quantified risks of personal data disclosure, and assessed investments in cyber-defense. The 2019 workshop will build on past efforts using empirical and analytic tools not only to understand threats, but also to strengthen security and privacy through novel evaluations of available solutions.

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

Optimal investment in information security
Models and analysis of online crime (including botnets, ransomware, and underground markets)
Cyber-risk quantification and cyber-insurance
Security standards and regulation
Vulnerability discovery, disclosure, and patching
Incentives for information sharing and cooperation
Cyber-security policy
Economics of privacy and anonymity
Behavioral security and privacy
Incentives for and against pervasive monitoring threats
Cyber-defense strategy


Submission

Submitted manuscripts should represent significant and novel research contributions. 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. This year, authors have the option to submit their manuscripts in anonymized form for double-blind review. Advisable rules of thumb include: using past WEIS accepted papers as templates and adhering to your community’s publication standards.

Please submit your papers via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=weis2019).

Authors whose papers appear at the workshop may be invited to submit a revised version to a special issue of the Journal of Cybersecurity, an interdisciplinary open access journal published by Oxford University Press.  Revised papers will undergo an additional round of peer review after the workshop, and accepted papers will appear in the special issue. Please note that publication charges must be paid to facilitate open access, but a publishing fund is available to authors whose institutions cannot pay. For more information please see http://cybersecurity.oxfordjournals.org/for_authors/index.html.