Managing the adoption of asymmetric bidirectional firewalls: Seeding and mandating

The security of the Internet can be significantly improved if Internet Service Providers adopt firewalls to monitor traffic entering and leaving access networks. But this process suffers due to `free-riding´, and hence, regulatory requirements and `seeding´ strategies are required to influence the adoption process. In this paper, we analytically derive the equilibrium adoption levels and relate them to the initial seeding and mandating condition, and explore the issues of incentive alignment across users, firewall developers, and regulators. We define different notions of optimality and analytically develop optimum seeding and mandating policies.