Future Internet Resilience Economics (FIRE)
This research project arising from Future Resilient Systems aims to bring together the fragmented entities of the internet to cooperate and trade defense resources against cyber-attacks.
The Internet infrastructure is owned and operated by many stakeholders each with competing economic and political interests resulting in a fragmented internet vulnerable to cyberattacks. To deliver high-quality digital services in a secure and resilient next-generation Internet a concerted effort and cooperation among all stakeholders is imperative. However many promising technologies and defense mechanisms have failed to materialise either due to misaligned incentives of stakeholders or incompatibility with today’s Internet architecture.
This project aims to bring together the fragmented entities of the Internet to cooperate and trade defense resources against cyber-attacks. We leverage emerging technologies to efficiently allocate resilience resources to where they are needed and to establish trust among the participants.
Our project will offer a market with distributed trust and an enabling resilience economics where the participants get compensated for their cooperation thus enabling the stakeholders to reap the economic benefits of improved resilience.
This project addresses the resilience of the internet against the growing threat of cyber-attacks by developing economically viable and market-enabled cooperative defence strategies and exploring the role of Future Internet Architectures. The objectives are:
- Map the resilience capacity to cyber-attack defence mechanisms.
- Develop a cooperative defence mechanism with ensured trust.
- Develop market mechanisms for the cooperative defence resources and for resources under Future Internet Architectures.
- Derive the economics behind the resilience against cyber-attacks subject to the relevant stakeholders and their incentives.
FIRE is an intra-CREATE seed grant collaboration project that will run for 18 months beginning on 1 April 2023. The project is led by Dr Felix Kottman (Lead-PI, Singapore-ETH Centre) and Dr Utku Tefek (Lead-PI, Illinois at Singapore, with support from researchers at ILATSG, NTU, NUS and ETH Zurich.