Modeling and Simulation of the Escalation Archetype in Computer Security

To support decision-making for mitigating computer security risks, we developed and used a system dynamics model of security aspects of an enterprise system. We describe the notion of archetypes in general and the escalation archetype specifically, showing how it can arise in computer security. We show the effects of this instance of escalation through simulation of our model, consider the effects of changes in the simulation, and discuss the prognoses drawn from the archetype literature and their applicability to security.