Today, proliferation of attacks and spam raises questions about the future of the Internet. Current organizational structure of the Internet does not encourage providers to secure both incoming and outgoing traffic. Beyond responding to each new attack with technological counters, it is necessary to build a sustainable framework that ensures the edge, transit and core providers, equipment vendors and users will coordinate to advance security. An economic mechanism is proposed to transform the

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... ganizational incentive framework, by certifying providers. The mechanism propagates incentives through the network, with a view to motivating secure technical design; it preserves the decentralized nature of the Internet, while ensuring coordination of the distributed participants toward increased security and reduced congestion. The paper uses game theory to analyze the strategies of participants and resulting outcomes when the mechanism is deployed.