The 13th Annual Workshop on the Economic of Information Security
(WEIS 2014)

Pennsylvania State University, June 23-24, 2014

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 2014 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, phishing, and spam)
Risk management and cyber-insurance
Security standards and regulation
Cyber-security and privacy policy
Security and privacy models and metrics
Economics of privacy and anonymity
Behavioral security and privacy
Vulnerability discovery, disclosure, and patching
Cyber-defense strategy and game theory
Incentives for information sharing and cooperation
Incentives for and against pervasive monitoring threats

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. Advisable rules of thumb include: using past WEIS accepted papers as templates and adhering to your community's publication standards.