Biblio

The installation of a protection system can provide protection by either deterring or stopping an attacker. Both modes of effectiveness-deterring and stopping-are uncertain. Some have guessed that deterrence plays a much bigger role than stopping force. The force of deterrence should therefore be of considerable interest, especially if its effect could be estimated and incorporated into a larger risk analysis and business case for developing and buying new systems, but nowhere has it been estimated quantitatively. The effect of one type of deterrence, namely, influencing an attacker's choice of targets-or target shifting, biasing an attacker away from some targets toward others-is assessed quantitatively here using a game-theoretic approach. It is shown that its positive effects are significant. It features as a force multiplier on the order of magnitude or more, even for low-performance security countermeasures whose effectiveness may be compromised somewhat, of necessity, in order to keep the number of false alarms serviceably low. The analysis furthermore implies that there are certain minimum levels of stopping performance that a protection should provide in order to avoid attracting the choice of attackers (under deterrence). Nothing in the analysis argues for complacency in security. Developers must still design the best affordable systems. The analysis enters into the middle ground of security, between no protection and impossibly perfect protection. It counters the criticisms that some raise about lower-level, affordable, sustainable measures that security providers naturally gravitate toward. Although these measures might in some places be defeated in ways that a non-expert can imagine, the measures are not for that reason irresponsible or to be dismissed. Their effectiveness can be much greater than they first appear.

To better inform the public cybersecurity discussion, in January 2011 the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) developed a comprehensive set of cybersecurity principles for industry and government [1]. ITI's six principles aim to provide a useful and important lens through which any efforts to improve cybersecurity should be viewed.

Protecting critical infrastructure from cyberattacks by other nations is a matter of considerable concern. Can deterrence play a role in such protection? Can lessons from nuclear deterrence-the most elaborated and successful version of deterrence-be adapted to the cyber case? Currently, little overlap exists between the two, although that might change in the aftermath of an extensive, destructive cyberattack. The most effective way to protect the cyber-dependent infrastructure is a comprehensive defense (deterrence by denial), which was impractical in the nuclear regime. However, this approach presents challenges. Existing legal norms, particularly those related to controlling collateral damage, might provide some deterrence. Another option might be a new international agreement, but that would involve several difficult issues.

Performance of routing is severely degraded when misbehaving nodes drop packets instead of properly forwarding them. In this paper, we propose a Game-Theoretic Adaptive Multipath Routing (GTAMR) protocol to detect and punish selfish or malicious nodes which try to drop information packets in routing phase and defend against collaborative attacks in which nodes try to disrupt communication or save their power. Our proposed algorithm outranks previous schemes because it is resilient against attacks in which more than one node coordinate their misbehavior and can be used in networks which wireless nodes use directional antennas. We then propose a game theoretic strategy, ERTFT, for nodes to promote cooperation. In comparison with other proposed TFT-like strategies, ours is resilient to systematic errors in detection of selfish nodes and does not lead to unending death spirals.

The question of whether strategic deterrence in cyberspace is achievable given the challenges of detection, attribution and credible retaliation is a topic of contention among military and civilian defense strategists. This paper examines the traditional strategic deterrence theory and its application to deterrence in cyberspace (the newly defined 5th battlespace domain, following land, air, sea and space domains), which is being used increasingly by nation-states and their proxies to achieve information dominance and to gain tactical and strategic economic and military advantage. It presents a taxonomy of cyberattacks that identifies which types of threats in the confidentiality, integrity, availability cybersecurity model triad present the greatest risk to nation-state economic and military security, including their political and social facets. The argument is presented that attacks on confidentiality cannot be subject to deterrence in the current international legal framework and that the focus of strategy needs to be applied to integrity and availability attacks. A potential cyberdeterrence strategy is put forth that can enhance national security against devastating cyberattacks through a credible declaratory retaliation capability that establishes red lines which may trigger a counter-strike against all identifiable responsible parties. The author believes such strategy can credibly influence nation-state threat actors who themselves exhibit serious vulnerabilities to cyber attacks from launching a devastating cyber first strike.

This paper introduces Microsoft’s perspective on supply chain risk and the relationship of such risk to global trade in ICT products. It reviews the considerations that lead governments to express concerns about supply chain security and discusses the implications of some approaches to “solving the problem.” It points out the importance of having national approaches to supply chain risk management that are risk-based, transparent, flexible and reciprocal or standards-based.

We propose a lightweight RFID authentication protocol that supports forward and backward security. The only cryptographic mechanism that this protocol uses is a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) that is shared with the backend Server. Authentication is achieved by exchanging a few numbers (3 or 5) drawn from the PRNG. The lookup time is constant, and the protocol can be easily adapted to prevent online man-in-the-middle relay attacks. Security is proven in the UC security framework.