The Workshop on the Economics of Information Security just opened up it’s call for papers for 2008. This year it will be held at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
I have written about this workshop in the past (here, here and here). The amount of quality content that comes out of this is incredible. As most readers of this blog know, information security is much greater than a technical issue. This workshop addresses many of those problems including the economic incentives of security and privacy, the various trade-offs individuals and groups must make to achieve a level of security, addressing negative externalities, the psychology of security and more.
If you have an interest in the driving factors of what makes many of our systems more or less secure, I would highly recommend this workshop. Last year’s workshop generated a tremendous amount of buzz about WabiSabiLabi. The online vulnerability marketplace for selling and purchasing vulnerabilities.
I would recommend reading Economics of Information Security as a great primer / introduction to the topics related to the workshop. You can find a link to it on the bookshelf of this site. It contains several papers that came directly from it. This is a great way to dig yourself out of some of the day to day technical details and start thinking about some of the more broad decision factors around security and privacy. While many of the papers come from academia, the information is a great way for those leading security programs in the private sector to understand the decision criteria that ultimately will fund or not fund their initiatives.
I just signed up to speak at the next 
