The 17th Annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2018)

Innsbruck, Austria, June 18-19, 2018

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 2018 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.

Authors whose papers appear at the workshop will 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.htm.

Conference Chair

Rainer Böhme, University of Innsbruck

Program Committee

Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University
Ross Anderson, Cambridge University
Daniel Arce, UT Dallas
Hadi Asghari, TU Delft
Terrence August, UC San Diego
Johannes Bauer, Michigan State University
Joseph Bonneau, New York University
Laura Brandimarte, University of Arizona
Jean Camp, Indiana University
Jonathan Cave, RAND Europe
Huseyin Cavusoglu, University of Texas at Dallas
Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon University
John Chuang, UC Berkeley
Richard Clayton, University of Cambridge
Ben Edelman, Harvard Business School
Ben Edwards, IBM Research
Serge Egelman, ICSI & UC Berkeley
M. Eric Johnson, Vanderbilt University
Allan Friedman, US Department of Commerce
Neil Gandal, Tel Aviv University
Dan Geer, In-Q-Tel
Lawrence Gordon, University of Maryland
Jens Grossklags, TU Munich
Chad Heitzenrater, Air Force Research Laboratory
Cormac Herley, Microsoft Research
Kai-Lung Hui, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Aron Laszka, Vanderbilt University
Martin Loeb, University of Maryland
Thomas Maillart, University of Geneva
Fabio Massacci, University of Trento
Kanta Matsuura, University of Tokyo
Damon McCoy, New York University
Katerina Mitrokotsa, Chalmers University of Technology
Tyler Moore, University of Tulsa
Milton Mueller, Georgia Tech
Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University
Andrew Odlyzko, University of Minnesota
Wolter Pieters, TU Delft
David Pym, University College London
Sam Ransbotham, Boston College
Sasha Romanosky, RAND
Rahul Telang, Carnegie Mellon University
Catherine Tucker, MIT
Michel van Eeten, Delft University of Technology
Liad Wagman, Illinois Institute of Technology
Julian Williams, Durham University
Dmitry Zhdanov, Georgia State University