A Fuzzy Security Investment Decision Support Model for Highly Distributed Systems

The economic aspect of information security is a comparatively new discipline so that there is hardly any extensive research work. This applies in particular to measures in highly distributed systems which have been neglected in previous research. The present paper focuses on the security investments in such systems. We augment an existing research about a fuzzy decision support model by defining appropriate operators in order to applicate this work in practice. The proposed model includes uncertainty with respect to the impact of investments on the achieved security levels of components of the distributed system. We further develop a heuristic to solve the problem and test the heuristic experimentally. The paper concludes with a discussion and gives an outlook to future work in the context of security investments.