The Fifth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2006)
Robinson College, University of Cambridge, England
26-28 June 2006

C A L L   F O R   P A P E R S

Do we spend enough on hunting down bad guys on the Internet? Do we not 
spend enough? Or do we spend too much?

One of the most exciting and rapidly-growing fields at the boundary 
between technology and the social sciences is the economics of 
information security. Many security and privacy failures are not purely 
technical: for example, the person best placed to protect a system may 
be poorly motivated if the costs of system failure fall on others. 
Many pressing problems, such as spam, are unlikely to be solved by 
purely technical means, as they have economic and policy aspects too. 
Building dependable systems also raises questions such as open versus 
closed systems, the pricing of vulnerabilities and the frequency of 
patching. The `economics of bugs' are of growing importance to both 
vendors and users.

Now that both crime and conflict are becoming virtualised, many of the 
lessons learned by information security economists may travel to other 
security applications, such as law enforcement. Law enforcement 
concerns such as traffic analysis impact on information security costs 
and practices in turn. For these and other reasons, the confluence 
between information security and economics is of growing importance.

Information security mechanisms are increasingly used not just to
protect against malicious attacks, but also to protect monopolies, 
differentiate products and segment markets. There are deep questions 
about the economics and politics of DRM, of locking printers to the 
maker's cartridges, and of practices such as region coding.

Original research papers are sought for the Fifth Workshop on the
Economics of Information Security. Topics of interest include the
dependability of open source and free software, the interaction of
networks with crime and conflict, the economics of digital rights 
management and trusted computing, liability and insurance, reputation, 
privacy, risk perception, the economics of trust, the return on 
security investment, and economic perspectives on spam.

Important dates
 * Submissions due: March 20, 2006
 * Notification of acceptance: April 24, 2006
 * Workshop: June 26-28, 2006

WEIS 2006 is co-located with the Sixth Workshop on Privacy Enhancing 
Technologies (PET), to be held June 28-30, 2006.  

Papers should be sent by noon GMT on Monday March 20, 2006 to Ross 
Anderson.  For more information please visit
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~twm29/WEIS06/

Program committee:

Chair
Ross Anderson (Cambridge)

Committee
Alessandro Acquisti (Carnegie Mellon)
Jean Camp (University of Indiana)
Huseyin Cavusoglu (Tulane University)
Larry Gordon (University of Maryland)
Marty Loeb (University of Maryland)
Andrew Odlyzko (University of Minnesota)
Stuart Schechter (MIT Lincoln Laboratory)
Bruce Schneier (Counterpane)
Rahul Telang (Carnegie Mellon)
Hal Varian (UC Berkeley)