The economics of information security has recently become a thriving and fast-
moving discipline. As distributed systems are assembled from machines belonging to
principals with divergent interests, we find incentives becoming as important to de-
pendability as technical design is. The new field provides valuable insights not just
into ‘security’ topics such as privacy, bugs, spam, and phishing, but into more gen-
eral areas such as system dependability (the design of peer-to-peer systems and the
optimal balance of effort by programmers and testers), policy (particularly digital
rights management) and more general security questions (such as law-enforcement
strategy).