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Summary: 1
How Bad are Selfish Investments in Network
Security?
Libin Jiang, Venkat Anantharam and Jean Walrand
EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
{ljiang,ananth,wlr}@eecs.berkeley.edu
Abstract--Internet security does not only depend on the
security-related investments of individual users, but also on how
these users affect each other. In a non-cooperative environment,
each user chooses a level of investment to minimize his own
security risk plus the cost of investment. Not surprisingly, this
selfish behavior often results in undesirable security degradation
of the overall system. In this paper, (1) we first characterize the
price of anarchy (POA) of network security under two models:
an "Effective-investment" model, and a "Bad-traffic" model. We
give insight on how the POA depends on the network topology,
individual users' cost functions, and their mutual influence. We
also introduce the concept of "weighted POA" to bound the
region of all feasible payoffs. (2) In a repeated game, on the
other hand, users have more incentive to cooperate for their
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