I330: Legal and Organizational Security Informatics

Readings and schedule for Organizational Informatics for Spring 2006.
11:15 - 12:05 pm Monday and Wednesday in OP 107
Professor Jean Camp

The Course in a Nutshell

January 9

Introduction and course overview

Today we handle who, when, and why. We will introduce ourselves. I will define course policies. I will provide information about the project, about grade distribution, etc.
This course is about ICTs, organizations and the role of security in organizations. The course has three primary elements.
First, the readings and lectures where the minimum critical topics for literacy in organizations and information security are introduced. The readings and lectures will focus primarily on theory, particularly looking at organizations through the lens of economics.
Second, the discussion section. There will be some readings during the discussion section, primarily those that apply to the practical training part of the course.
Third, the three examinations in the course. The first is on organizational theory. The second is on economics of information. The third is on organizational and economic aspects of organizations. There is no comprehensive final.

 

Introduction to Organizations

An organization can be considered a single entity, a collection of competing subsets, a group of self-optimizing individuals, a machine following a process, or a cultural entity. In the first section of this course we will examine each of those models. For three of the models the reading will be Essence of Decision. This book is about the interaction of nation states rather than the interactions of businesses. However, in terms of the descriptions of three of these models there is no other reading that is short but informative. There are more tedious readings, and readings made terse by assumptions of the education of the reader. Therefore, the classic by Allison will be used to discuss the issues. I will provide a very short introduction to rational choices, and then examine the limits of rationality. We return to the limits of rationality topic in Economics and Uncertainty.

What are Organizations

Organizational Models?

Questions to consider during reading

What are organizations: individual rational actors, collections of groups or stakeholders, and as groups of political individuals with their own visions and power struggles. Shafritz offers a larger view. What is an organization? To what organizations do you belong? If you were to design an web site for two organizations to which you belong what would be public, and what private? How much would identity management matter at a fraternity web site versus a departmental one? How would privacy concerns differ?

Readings

Classics of Organization Theory, (6th Edition) by Jay M. Shafritz, Steven Ott, and Yong Suk Jang; pp 1- 26.
The Science of the Artificial, (3rd Edition) by Simon, pp. 25-50.

 

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Until 1964, single rational organizations seeking employees listed them in four categories: white man wanted, black man wanted, white woman wanted and black woman wanted. Listing by race was prohited by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By 1971, listing jobs by gender was judged to be prohibited as well. Here is one job listing and another. Notice in the first that typing was a female task, and notice that Bell was hiring women as Telephone Operators. The operation of switches became technical and then male. Similarly until compilers (invented by Grace Murray Hopper) vastly simplified the process of implementing programs, programming was overwhelming a female occupation.

 

Organizations as Single Rational Beings or Compilations of Competing Stakeholders

Questions to consider during reading

There are three models of organizations: individual rational actors, collections of groups or stakeholders, and as groups of political individuals with their own visions and power struggles.

Readings

Allison Essence of Decision, The Rational Actor, pp. 13 26.
Allison, Essence of Decision, Model II: Organizational Behavior, pp. 143-160.

 

Organizations as Cultures or Organizations as Machines

Questions to consider during reading

Americans spend most of their waking hours are work. Workplaces are not neutral or free from emotion. Workplaces have their own cultures, some of which are successfully cultured by management.

Readings

Van Mannen, J. (1991) The Smile Factory: Work at Disneyland., In Frost, P.J., L.E. Moore, M.R. Louis, C.C. Lundberg and J. Martin (eds.): Reframing Organizational Culture.
R. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 8 (pp. 1-20, 21-29, 30-43, 106-119)
Morgan, Gareth (1997) Ch. 6: Organizations as Machines in Images of Organization. London: Sage,

 

Organizational Impact

Questions to consider during reading

Why is IT important in an organization? Are ICTS inherently valuable? If not, how do ICTs illustrate their value. Unlike classic organization theory classes, this one examines organizations and their inteaction with ICTs. Does IT matter or is it all a matter of lobbying and leadership?

Reading

Carr, Nicholas G., IT Doesn't Matter, Harvard Business Review, May 2003.
Deborah Spar Ruling the Waves pp. 1-22, p.124-289

 

Applying Organizational Theory

A Case Study of Business, Government and Technology: DNS

Questions to consider during reading

What is the profit in the selling of domain names? What is the cost? Were the concerns of these authors valid? Which ones have come to pass, and which ones have not?

Reading:

Fool Me Once, Shame on You, A Critical Look at the Privitization of ICANN
Michael Froomkin's discussion of power concentration The Empire Strikes Back and in particular how ICANN is a part of this trend in Of Governance and Governments

 

Naming, Risk and Culture

Questions to consider during reading

Naming and trust are traditionally bound online in a manner that makes sense offline. If I know you by name offline I am likely to have a context; e.g. a social organization or neighborhood or religious community. However, a name online does not provide the same level of certainty. What is in a name? A rose by any other name, in theory, would smell as sweet. However, hazelnuts are considered somewhat gourmet while filberts were strictly for the common palette. While dried plums could be desirable, prunes have no such connotation.

Readings

Ross Anderson, Security Engineering Naming, pp. 124-133; PKI pp. 401- 403.
Alexander Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, Benne de Weger, Creating a Rogue CA. http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

Topical Interest

DigiNotar forced into bankruptcy
But many more and been hacked and unreported according to the EFF

 

Test

 

Deletion

Questions to consider during reading

Deletion in an organization must recall famous deletions of time passed. We will read about four cases of the choice to delete or not. Should an organization delete and when is it legal to do so?

Reading:

retention at work
Trustworthy vacuuming and litigation holds in long-term high-integrity records retention In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT '10), Ioana Manolescu, Stefano Spaccapietra, Jens Teubner, Masaru Kitsuregawa, Alain Leger, Felix Naumann, Anastasia Ailamaki, and Fatma Ozcan (Eds.).

Topical Interest
Romeny deletes emails, how common is this? does it matter?
Deletion at Google

 

ACL

Questions to consider during reading

It is not organizational charts but access control that defines roles and relationships. These two readings address two questions. First, what is access control? Second, is there any chance it is being used correctly.

Reading:

Security textbook to be determined based on course experience
Maxion & Reeder, Improving user-interface dependability through mitigation of human errorInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies Volume 63, Issues 1-2, July 2005, Pages 25-50

 

Great Failures in ACL

Questions to consider during reading

Why has the insider threat proven such a difficult problem, given the capacity for auditing and access control? Why were these insiders able to take such great risks?

Reading:

Bellovin, The Insider Attack Problem Nature and Scope, Advances in Information Security, 2008, Volume 39, 1-4.
T.Wilson. Insider may have breached more than 10000 patient records at johns hopkins, May 2009.
The biggest rogue traders in history, in 2011

Topical Interest

Police Charge UBS Trader With Fraud

 

ACL Lab

Identity

Questions to consider during reading

What is identity? How does identity interact with authentication?

Reading:

the so-called Laws of Identity
Report of the Identity Workshop

Topical Interest

Can a copy own an employee's linked-in account?

 

Single Signon & Federated Identity

Questions to consider during reading

Why did Microsoft passport fail while Google and Facebook appear to be succeeding? Do you agree with this assertion in the reading, having a single sign-on mechanism is not much different from using the same username and password on every Web site?

Reading:

Passport morphed into the Identity Metasystem which has now evolved into the NET framework.
Single sign-on Facebook v Google
David Recordon and Drummond Reed. 2006. OpenID 2.0: a platform for user-centric identity management In Proceedings of the second ACM workshop on Digital identity management (DIM '06). ACM, New York, NY,

Topical Interest

Single Sign-on with Facebook LinkedIn GMail a short overview.

Open ID Lab

 

Digital is Different

Questions to consider during reading

Fundamental assumptions underlie market economics. How does digital challenge those assumptions.

Readings

Delong and Froomkin (1997) The Next Economy? Internet Publishing and Beyond: The Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property. Edited by B Kahin and H Varian. Cambridge, MA MIT Press. http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/newecon.htm

 

Games Companies Play

Questions to consider during reading

Another fundamental assumption about markets is that they are rational. This is clearly not the case.

Readings

Tversky and Kahneman, Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions in Rational Choice, Hogarth and Reder, eds., pp. 67-94.
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 20 edited by Leonard Berkowitz, Attitudes, Traits, and Actions by Icek Ajzen.

 

Social Security

Questions to consider during reading

Social networking brings security as well as privacy risk. Have you ever refused a friend on FaceBook.

Readings

A. Acquisti and R. Gross. Imagined communities: Awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the Facebook. In Privacy Enhancing Technologies, pages 36-58. Springer, 2006.
H. Jones and J. Soltren. Facebook: Threats to privacy. Project MAC: MIT Project on Mathematics and Computing,
FTC decision and customer pushback

 

Who Needs Anonymity?

Questions to consider during reading

Under what conditions are you anonymous?

Readings

Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router, Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson, 13th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2004.
Blackhat on Tor

 

Spring Break

Economics of Information

Interconnection and Network Effects

Questions to consider during reading Feedback is a critical concept in the economics of networks and in network-based competition.

Reading

Noam, Interconnecting the Network of Networks, MIT Press, 2001. pp. 1-25, 54-68

Optional Reading

The Economics of Networks, by Nicholas Economides, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 673-699 (October 1996). Available on-line

 

Tor Lab

Lock-in and feedback

Questions to consider during reading

Network economics implies feedback. Feedback can cause lock-in. How easy will it be for you to get a new email? A new phone?

Readings

W. B. Arthur, "Competing Technologies, Increasing returns and Lock-in by Historical Events", The Economic Journal, Vol 99, Issue 394, pp116-131
P. A. David "Clio and the Economics of Qwerty" The American Economic Review, Vol 75, Issue 2, Papers and Proceedings of the 97th Annual Review of the American Economic Association, May 1985, pp. 332-337.

 

Versioning

Questions to consider during reading

What is versioning? How does digital change versioning?
MLS listings on-line http://www.realtor.com and http://www.targetmls.com/
Amazon.com and www.barnes and noble.com and www.reiters.com

Readings

Information Rules, Shapiro, Carl. & Varian, Hal, , Harvard Business School Press, (Boston, MA) , c1999, pages 53-81

 

Intermediation & Disintermediation

Questions to consider during reading

What is disintermediation? Re-intermediation? How does a bookstore inherently bring together certain business lines by virtue of physical location? Think about your favorite sites or consider these sites:
The Hunger Site -- http://www.thehungersite.com -- could this work off line?

Readings

Laudon & Traver, "E-commerce" second edition. pp. 136 - 162 pages 28-33
Whinston & Kalakota, "Electronic Commerce" pp. 21 - 23

 

NPV and Options

Questions to consider during reading

Net present value and options theory are different ways of looking at the same situation. When is one preferable? In class we will discuss how security can be an investment, with NPV, or an option.

Readings

Luehman, What's It Worth?: A General Manager's Guide to Valuation HBR May - June pp. 133-141

 

Second Test

 

Code and Control

Questions to consider during reading

The organization is the environment and, according to an early reading, the environment determines design. What kinds of controls are to be expected in different domains? In this course we will look at the requirements for three different domains: breath analyzers for DUI; casinos; and voting machines. Which do you expect to bemost secure? What are the risks of failues for each?

Readings

I hope that these serve as interesting palceholders. I need to locate the Nevada controls on casinos, the latest rules on voting machines in Indiana, and the Ohio court case on drunk driving and breath analyzers.

Casinos
Voting
Drunk Driving and on the software used by manufacturers for example, all interrupts are ignored

 

Free Software as Strategy

Questions to consider during reading

Open code, free software and open source are categories of a radical new way (or the old tried and true way) of organizing a market. What are the differences or ways of organizing a software or information market?

Readings

Lerner, Josh & Triole, Jean 2000 - 03 The Simple Economics of Open Source http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/JoshLernerandJeanTriole-TheSimpleEconomicsofOpenSource.pdf
Tuomi, I. (2001). Internet, innovation, and open source: Actors in the network .First Monday ,6(1). Retrieved October 6, 2001, from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_1/tuomi/index.html

 

Trusting TRUSTe

Questions to consider during reading

organizational rather than technical considerations appear to be at theart of the decisions by TRUSTe to offer certification to online organizations.

Readings

Benjamin Edelman, Adverse Selection in Online 'Trust' Certifications, Fifth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, 2006, Cambridge, UK, available online, at http://weis2006.econinfosec.org/docs/10.pdf
Nevena Vratonjic Julien Freudiger, ":The Inconvenient Truth about Web Certificates" http://weis2011.econinfosec.org/papers/The%20Inconvenient%20Truth%20about%20Web%20Certificates.pdf
Reinforcing bad behavrio

 

Privacy and Price Discrimination

Questions to consider during reading

Have you experienced price discrimination? How would you know?

Readings


Odlyzko, Privacy and Price Discrimination CH 15, pp 187-21 www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/privacy.economics.pdf

 

EULA

Questions to consider during reading

How are markets organized? What were the inherent assumptions about markets in the readings from last week? Where do markets come from? Who participates in defining the rules of a market? What are EULA and UCITA?

Readings

The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act: A Well Built Fence or Barbed Wire Around the Intellectual Commons? uts.cc.utexas.edu/~lbjjpa/2001/bowman.pdf
Information Rules , Shapiro, Carl. & Varian, Hal, , Harvard Business School Press, (Boston, MA) , c1999, also available as an e-book, pp. 1-50

Optional Readings

National Academy of Science, The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age. National Academy Press, Washington, DC (2000); (contents completely available on-line) pp. 1-75

 

Security and Competition

Questions to consider during reading

What are the goals of security in theory? How does this differ from how it is used in practice? Would the security strategies discussed in Anderson work with open code?

Readings

Ross Anderson, Cryptography and Competition Policy: Issues with Trusted Computing, http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/tcpa.pdf
Schneier, 2002 Computer Security: Its the Economics, Stupid: Economics and Information Security Workshop, Berkeley, CA. http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/affiliates/workshops/econsecurity/econws/18.doc

 

Test