Toronto Networking Seminar


Organized by Department of Computer Science and
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto







Secure or Insure? A Game 
Theoretic Analysis of Information

Security Games





Nicolas Christin


Information Networking Institute

Carnegie Mellon University 


 




Date: Friday, October 16, 2pm

Location: BA 1210 



Abstract:




  Security interactions in 
  networked systems, and the associated user choices, due to their complexity, 
  are notoriously difficult to predict, and sometimes even harder to 
  rationalize. We argue that users often underestimate the strong mutual 
  dependence between their security strategies and the economic environment 
  (e.g., threat model) in which these choices are made and evaluated. This 
  misunderstanding weakens the effectiveness of users' security investments. We 
  study how economic agents invest into security in different economic 
  environments, which are characteristic of different threat models. We notably 
  explore Nash equilibrium predictions for the environments considered, and 
  contrast them with social optima. We further discuss the effect of relaxing 
  assumptions on the amount of information available to users before they make a 
  decision.

  (Joint work with Jens Grossklags and Benjamin Johnson).



Bio:



Nicolas 
Christin is the Associate Director of the Information Networking Institute at 
Carnegie Mellon University, where he also serves as a faculty member. He is in 
addition a CyLab Systems Scientist, and (by courtesy) a faculty member in the 
Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He holds a Diplôme d'Ingénieur 
from École Centrale Lille, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from 
the University of Virginia. While in graduate school, he worked at Nortel's 
Advanced Technology Lab. Before joining Carnegie Mellon in 2005, he was a 
post-doctoral researcher in the School of Information at the University of 
California, Berkeley. He served for three years as resident faculty in the CyLab 
Japan program in Kobe (Japan), before returning to Carnegie Mellon's main campus 
in 2008. His research interests are in computer and information systems 
networks; most of his work is at the boundary of systems and policy research, 
with a slant toward security aspects. He has most recently focused on network 
security and its economics, incentive-compatible network topology design, and 
peer-to-peer security.

 





Host of the talk



  Jörg Liebeherr (jorg@comm.toronto.edu)