The Economics of Cybersecurity: From the Public Good to the Revenge of the Industry
In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s intelligence revelations, many governments around the world are increasingly elaborating so-called «digital sovereignty» policies. The declared aim is to develop trusted technologies to protect the more sensitive netwo
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Abstract. In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s intelligence revelations, many governments around the world are increasingly elaborating so-called «digital sovereignty» policies. The declared aim is to develop trusted technologies to protect the more sensitive networks. The ambition of this article is to turn over the complex- and often contrasting- motivations and interests behind the industrial policy movements, explain how the dominant representation of cybersecurity as public good is impacting the public policy and analyse the dynamics between private and public players. Keywords: Cyberspace Public policy Risk analysis Critical infrastructures
1 Introduction We live in the information age; everyone knows the advantages we enjoy from that. What is still blurred is the cost and the risk of our dependence upon the online life. As aptly stated by the philosopher Floridi, with the development and the massive penetration of ICTs in all advanced economies, people and engineered machines are now continuously connected with digital network and part of the same global environment made of information: the infosphere [1]. In addition, the same information infrastructure underpins the assets and services considered as vital to the essential functioning of industrialised economies, and make them interdependent. From power grids to banking systems, from traffic light controller to water distribution, the information assurance of data, networks and protocol of those infrastructures has become the central nervous system of our society. The internet of things (50 billion of devices to be connected to the internet in 2030) and the concept of smart city show the complexity of this interdependence that knows no sign of slowing. Now, if the pervasiveness of ICTs in our daily life has many advantages because facilitate social and economic activities, there is also a downside. The infosphere has come with new risks that are changing the nature of cybersecurity from a technical issue for a restricted expert-community to a social-political one. In fact at the origin, security was not a priority for the ICT’s developer and this has led to two interrelated levels of risk. The first one is the danger of systems failure and the cascading effects. Due to the interdependence of critical infrastructures (CIs), the impact of an incident won’t be limited to the original sector of activity nor to a national © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 A. Bécue et al. (Eds.): CyberICS 2015/WOS-CPS 2015, LNCS 9588, pp. 3–15, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40385-4_1
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border. For instance, in November 2006 a shutdown of a high-voltage line in Germany resulted in massive power failures in France and Italy, as well as in parts of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria, and even extended as far as Morocco, affecting ten million customers in total. The second risk is given by the potentially malicious actors exploiting technical vulnerabilities. Beyond the hacktivism (politically motivated) and criminal (monetization
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