Steven M. Bellovin forwards a pointer to: > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/econ_crypto.pdf
Ross Anderson gave his invited talk at Crypto yesterday on this topic of the economics of crypto and security. It was an excellent talk, showcasing a new way to look at problems that sheds light on a number of otherwise odd behaviors. At the same time economics is inherently fuzzier than the kind of mathematical precision we aim for in crypto results. It often seems that every economic claim has an opposing one with arguments on each side. Along these lines, I felt that many of the points Ross made were open to debate and interpretation. One example was his comparison between the security business and the used-car "lemons" market. The idea is that lemons dominate the used-car market due to asymmetric information: only the sellers know which cars are lemons, hence these are the ones that are mostly made available, hence buyers assume all cars are likely to be lemons, hence good cars can't be sold for a higher price and are largely kept off the market. However security products are not really that much like used cars. Used cars are individually unique and it is impossible to know in advance how well they will work. That's where the asymmetric information comes from. But security products are more like other retail products; each one has its own characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, and there are ways consumers can find out about them in advance. There was considerable publicity a couple of weeks ago about a side-by-side test at the LinuxWorld conference which compared ten anti-virus products, with highly differentiated results: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/09/2243229 Information on the quality of AV and other security products is widely available on the net, in magazines and other places that consumers might look for reviews and comparisons. This is completely unlike the situation with individual used cars. I don't see this analogy as particularly accurate. I certainly do fully support the concept behind Ross's program of investigating the role economics plays in the crypto and security field. The mere fact that so many of the conclusions are provocative indicates that there is much fertile work yet to be done. Ross is a major pioneer of this effort and I am looking forward to further interesting results. Hal Finney --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
