The Virtual Weapon and International Order by Lucas Kello

Author:Lucas Kello
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300220230
Publisher: Yale University Press

Defense Fragmentation

A second manifestation of systems change involves the provision of national security: governments are not the supreme, and in some cases not even the primary, defenders against cyber threats in the way that they are against conventional threats. Here, we must draw a distinction between two basic forms of defensive activity: active and passive.

The label “active defense” broadly denotes the virtual weapon’s use outside the defender’s or other friendly terrain to prevent or preempt a hostile cyber action.78 This does not imply the use of any specific kind of malware: the defending action can be exploitive, disruptive, or both. Rather, it means that the activity transpires outside the home network terrain for strictly defensive purposes.

States are the main players in the conduct of active defense. They possess the legal prerogative to inflict harm on attacking machines residing outside their jurisdiction. By contrast, most domestic penal codes – for example, the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – prohibit private actors from carrying out this activity. Even when they are the targets of a major impending offensive strike, it falls on the government, not the victims, to conduct (or not to conduct) active defense. Governments have good reasons to retain absolute rights over active defense. But many voices, including some in government, have called for an expansion of these rights to the private sector. We will deal with these reasons and their countervailing voices in Chapter 9. For now, it suffices to recognize that when it comes to cyber offense-as-defense, the government’s role is as the framers of the Conventional Model would expect: supreme.

Passive defense is more important and more common in the cyber realm than active defense. Passive measures such as resiliency and redundancy – the equivalents of underground shelters and target dispersal in nuclear defense – aim to thicken the defensive glacis and absorb damage from offensive hits. Unlike active defense, passive defense occurs solely within the bounds of the defender’s computer terrain. It seeks to neutralize threats that have arrived at or penetrated the home network perimeter.

Unquestionably, the private sector holds the greatest capacity for passive defense on its own terrain, and sometimes also in matters that affect government networks or impinge on national security. It does not commonly coordinate its passive defense measures with the government, for this would require the presence of police and military agents inside private networks that hold data, such as proprietary client data, that companies have legitimate (or illicit) reason to withhold from the prying eyes of the state. Such fragmentation of defense responsibilities is a limiting factor for states when formulating a coherent response to a cyberattack.

The problem of fragmentation begins with the authority over the core operations of cyberspace. The majority of critical computer infrastructures are designed, owned, and operated by private industry. Private utilities own plants that supply more than three-quarters of U.S. electrical power. The computer systems that process securities trades at the world’s four largest stock exchanges – NYSE, NASDAQ, the London Stock Exchange, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange – and many other exchanges operate under total private ownership.

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