Abstract:
In seeking to understand the motivations of people on the Internet who choose to steal the personal information of others by attacking, and the induced incentive to protect our information by defending, this thesis will be an exploration of three questions. The first - how does the structure of the underlying network affect the equilibrium social welfare of the contest for information? The second - how does the location of a person within the network affect their chances of being attacked, their incentive to attack or defend, and their expected pay-off in equilibrium? And the third - how do the characteristics of an information sharing network, such as the Internet, affect the threat of attack on that network? To answer these questions, we construct a theoretical model to reflect what we have observed to be the salient features of the contest for information on the Internet, based on an attack/defence game over a discrete graph. And we find three answers. The more connected the underlying network, the better the equilibrium social welfare in our attack defence game is likely to be, and the less likely the network is to descend into anarchic chaos with every player attacking and defending. The more central a person is in the network, the stronger they will be in the game, and the greater their expected pay-off will be in equilibrium. And finally, it may be that a network with more dense connections is better able to disincentivise attack, implying that a more connected world may be less prone to cyber crime.