A Web-Based Interface for a Blockchain-based Cyber Insurance Approach

Cybersecurity becomes a concern for companies and governments that rely on technology to run and maintain their services [1]. However, many times the cyberattacks are successfully done, causing several damages, such as financial losses, business disruption, and data stolen [2]. As the cyberattacks have been increased over the years, even with the evolve of protections, different models of cyber insurance coverage [3] have been proposed to minimize the impacts and provide a faster recovery when cyberattacks surpass the underlying protections of businesses. The cyber insurance market is still in its infancy around the globe. However, according to initial predictions, the worldwide spending on cyber insurance will achieve roughly 9 billion US$ by 2020 [4]. Based on that, novel approaches have been discussed to propose cyber insurance models [5, 6], such as those based on blockchain and smart contracts [6]. In a recent CSG master's thesis [7], the author proposed a blockchain-based cyberinsurance approach, which describes an information model to run in a smart contract to ensure the automated creation and execution of a cyberinsurance contract.

The goal of this thesis is to develop a web-based interface for the blockchain-based cyberinsurance model developed in [7], as well as improve the model to address real-world scenarios. Thus, both users and insurance companies can be able to interact with the platform to define agreements and coverages in order to deploy the trustworthy contract on the blockchain. 

References

[1] S. Morgan: Cybercrime Report: Cybercrime Damages will Cost the World 6 trillion Annually by 2021; August 2016, [Online] https://cybersecurityventures.com/hackerpocalypse-cybercrime-report-2016/,last visit February 2021.

[2] B. Rodrigues, M. F. Franco, G. Paranghi, B. Stiller: SEConomy: A Framework for the Economic Assessment of Cybersecurity; 16th International Conference on the Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services (GECON 2019), Springer, Leeds, UK, pp. 1–9.

[3] Dan Burke: Cyber Insurance 101: What Cyber Insurance Covers; October 2019, [Online] https://woodruffsawyer.com/cyber-liability/cyber-101-insurance-coverage-2020/, last visit February 2021.

[4] AFP: Cyber Insurance Market to Double by 2020, Says Munich Re; September 2018, [Online] https://www.securityweek.com/cyber-insurance-market-double-2020-says-munich-re, last visit February 2021. 

[5] R. Pal, L. Golubchik, K. Psounis, P. Hui: Will cyber-insurance improve network security? A market analysis; IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2014), Toronto, Canada, 2014, pp. 235-243.

[6] V. Gatteschi, F. Lamberti, Claudio Demartini, C. Pranteda, V. Santamaría: Blockchain and Smart Contracts for Insurance: Is the Technology Mature Enough?; MDPI Future Internet, Vol. 10, No. 2, February 2018, pp. 1-16, [Online] https://www.the-digital-insurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/1243-futureinternet-10-00020-v2-1.pdf, last visit February 2021.

[7] Noah Berni: SC4CyberInsurance: Automated Cyber-Insurance Contracts; Universität Zürich, Communication Systems Group, Department of Informatics, Zürich, Switzerland, January 2021, [Online] https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/CSG/staff/franco/extern/theses/MA-N-Berni.pdf, last visit February 2021.