CAREER: Securing Off-premise Digital Services in the Presence of Strategic Incentives

George Mason University, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed significant growth in both cloud and decentralized computing, whereby data and services either live on remote servers or are distributed across many individual devices. Both models raise similar security concerns: As clients lack full control over the service process, they need to make sure that service providers have the right economic incentives to not misbehave. Since the predominant framework in cybersecurity has been motivated by traditional in-house computing, our current thinking about cybersecurity often does not adequately emphasize economic incentives. This project is thus conducting interdisciplinary research to analyze the well-functioning of cyberinfrastructure in the presence of incentive issues. The project aims to enable a more diversified and robust infrastructure; improve digital service efficiency for economic competitiveness; foster competition in digital services provision with technology; bring frontier STEM topics to a broader audience including economists, business researchers, and the general public; and develop education materials to bridge the gap between tech and business students. With the overall objective to enrich the existing paradigm for cybersecurity analysis from a cross-disciplinary perspective, the project team is studying several specific topics under the theme, including the principal-agent frictions between cloud clients and providers, and how to deal with it using both contract theory and recent advances in cryptography, the long-term sustainability of decentralized systems featuring interactions among strategic participants as well as Byzantine faults, and the potential of using results from the first two thrusts to organize a more efficient, fair, and inclusive digital economy. Within these analyses, the project is also illuminating several recent cryptographic breakthroughs for business/economics researchers. By raising awareness, the project team aims to encourage critical assessments of the economic and societal benefits associated with these advances and offer a fresh perspective to guide their further development. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.