Bootstrapping the Adoption of Internet Security Protocols

The deployment of network-wide security enhancements to the Internet has proven more difficult than many had initially anticipated. We leverage existing models of networks’ value to model the problem of bootstrapping the adoption of security technologies. We describe a variety of policy interventions and deployment strategies that can help to catalyze this adoption. Using this framework, we provide a series of short case studies for previous attempts to deploy security technologies to the Internet. We then provide a detailed study of strategies for deploying security-enhanced protocols into the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). Finally, we show how the adoption of these DNS security enhancements can help to alleviate bootstrapping problems that have impeded the deployment of other security-enhanced protocols.

To model the problem of deploying new security technologies into an existing network infrastructure, we begin by assuming that the existing network has a set of users U. Deploying the security technology comes at a cost. We will focus on the per-user cost of deployment as these costs are often the primary barriers to adoption. We define c i to be the fixed cost for user u i ∈ U to deploy the technology. We assume that this cost-to-adopt remains constant; however, if the adoption cost depends on the adoption choices of other users, the cost could easily be represented as a function.

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