First published: 31st May 2007
In the May 2007 issue of his Crypto-Gram security newsletter, Bruce Schneier uses American economist George Akerlof's Nobel Prize-winning idea about how asymmetrical information damages markets to explain the number of mediocre or just plain bad security products available.
Essentially, it is not easy for buyers to test whether their purchases work, so cheap, useless products take over the market, driving out good products. The solution is a "signal", an unfakeable indicator of true quality. A similar idea is seen in evolutionary biology, where many species use expensive, potentially dangerous features (bright plumage, long tails, building an elaborate courtship bower etc.) as unfakeable signals of the successfulness of an individual during mate selection.