Arms Race Within Information Ecosystems

Abstract

Interacting agents of exploiters and users within an information ecosystem may be regarded both as biological beings and as part of an economic system of infohabitants. A protection system can be implementing as a filter governing the access to assets. Typically we will have a chain of attacks and countermeasures concerning this access to the desired assets. We model this process as an arms race. We base our model on microeconomics and a process model of a protection system based on exposure time. A user’s reaction against an exploiter measure could either be a direct response to the measure or trying to anticipate future attacks by more general means of defeating the protection of the exploiter agent. When anticipating future attacks and countermeasures, both users and exploiters will improve their methods and tools due to an arms race. Our arms race model refines the competition as modeled in computational markets to model aspects which typically arise when societies grows beyond what can be controlled in a centralized manner. A dynamic, evolving and robust ecosystem of autonomous agents is a preferred and possible outcome of the arms race.

This work is partly supported by the European Project ALFEBIITE (A Logical Framework for Ethical Behavior between Infohabitants in the Information Trading Economy of the Universal Information Ecosystem): IST-1999-10298.