Overcoming Markets for Lemons in ICT Products and Services: Metrics, Labelling, and Policy

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ABSTRACT

Governments must reshape the incentives of ICT businesses to move the global ICT ecosystem towards much higher standards for security and resilience. Asymmetric information can lead to market distortions. Other factors like oligopoly in processors and operating systems and open-source software contribute to suppression of security levels. The ICT industrial infrastructure ossifies around poor security architectures. Because multi-spectrum Adversaries (MSA) orchestrate a range of intelligence capabilities against a target: work factor analysis must be comprehensive due to conservation of threat (Gosler’s law).  Defensive complexity analysis decomposes work factor into its constituent 

dimensions to enable deep analysis of each dimension and orchestration of those components in planning. Work factor engineering is enabled the integration of composable formalizations and scalable statistics within a planning framework. 

Slides found here.

 

BIO

John C. Mallery is the CTO of WFA Group LLC. Since 1980, he has been a researcher at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and its successor the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in various capacities from graduate student to research scientist. He is also an Oxford Martin School Associate, a Senior Fellow at the Security and Defence Research Centre of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) in Paris, and an affiliate of the Digital Society Institute at the European School for Management Technology (ESMT) in Berlin. He is a frequent speaker on cyber topics in the United States, Europe, and Asia.  To fight the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, he founded and leads an international Biosecurity Analysis Group together with an associated weekly seminar. His recent research involves cyber impacts on world order, military cyber stability, cyber norms and CBMs, national cyber strategies, countering cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, cyber impacts on world order, economics of information assurance, and technical strategies for cyber defense. Since 2016, he has organized track 1.5 conferences with like-minded allies on cyber norms and related topics. In 2015, he co-organized a G7 track 1.5 conference on intellectual property protection in Paris. Since 2010, he has participated in track 1.5 dialogues with Chinese and Russian cyber experts with a focus on escalatory dynamics of cyber conflict and cyber risk reduction via functional confidence building measures and norms. Since 2016, he has organized a series of roundtables on military cyber stability with Russia and China. He has participated in a number of NATO activities, including serving SPS as a co-director for a Science for Peace and Security project with Jordan 2014-2016. From the early 1990s, he has advised governments on Internet strategy, digital communications, cyber strategy, advanced architectural concepts for cyber security research, and transformational computing.  In 2008, he initiated an early research program in cyber policy at MIT and Harvard with DoD Minerva funding. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, he served on Obama's cyber policy team and helped craft his July 16, 2008 cyber platform.  Since 2006, he organized a series of national workshops on technical and policy aspects of cyber. His interests span a variety of fields from artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, computer science and information assurance to cyber defense, economics and international relations. In 1988, he conceptualized the field of computational politics as he developed the Relatus Natural Understanding System and non-rectangular machine learning techniques for analyzing international relations using the SHERFACS Conflict and Cooperation data set. During the 1990s, he was the principal architect and developer of the White House Electronic Publications System that served the Clinton Administration from 1992-2001. In the process of helping drive early US Internet strategy, he created and fielded the first large-scale wide-area collaboration system for the Vice President's 1994 Open Meeting on the National Performance Review with 4000 Federal workers, pioneered online survey research in 1992 leading up to hierarchical adaptive surveys in 1996, and implemented the first production HTTP 1.1 Web server and URN resolver, among many other firsts.

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