Understanding the institutional landscape of cyber security

Abstract

The decentralized architecture of the Internet, which has been key to its development and worldwide deployment, is making it challenging to secure Internet user experience. Many organizations claim to be playing a role in improving Internet security. If anything, the space of security-related institutions seems on first inspection to be over-populated, yet poor security persists. This work proposes a framework to understand the role different institutions play in cyber security. The analysis gives insights into the broad institutional ecosystem of public, private and international actors, and the varied nature of these institutions, their interests, incentives, and contributions to cyber security from hardware, software, protocols, standards and regulation. Based on natural language clustering algorithms, this framework classifies institutions along five dimensions: the aspect of cyber security the institution covers (e.g. network security, cybercrime), the industry and activity sector of the institution (e.g. telecommunications, software and service providers), whether it is part of a specific jurisdiction (e.g. US, Europe), specific institution's characteristics such as its working mode (e.g. forum, information sharing) or primary focus (e.g. economic development, consumer trust), and the governance type (for-profit, not-for-profit, government or international organization). We developed a dataset of approximately 120 institutions that claim a role with respect to cyber security, and using the framework, we identify areas of competing and overlapping institutional interest, relevant areas out of scope of current institutions and dysfunctionalities that hinder overall security improvement.