Rick Wash

Associate Professor,
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Contact Info

A Social Mechanism for Home Computer Security

by: Rick Wash and Jeff MacKie-Mason

Abstract

Hackers have learned to leverage the enormous number of poorly protected home computers by turning them into a large distributed system (known as a botnet), making home computers an important frontier for security research. They present special problems: owners are unsophisticated, and usage profiles are varied making onesize-fits-all firewall policies ineffective. We propose a social firewall that collects security decisions and both user and usage characteristics, and provides users with personalized information to assist with allow/deny recommendations. To succeed, a social firewall must deal with at least three user behavior issues: why contribute private information? why make effort to provide quality information? and, how to prevent manipulation by adversaries? We sketch an incentive-centered design approach to each problem. We provide an economic model and some analytic results for a solution to the fundamental problem: why contribute? We show that an excludable public goods mechanism can achieve a better outcome than a system without social motivators.