Crisis and escalation in cyberspace

Avoiding crises by creating norms

Narratives, dialogues, and signaling

Escalation management

Strategic stability

Conclusions and recommendations for the Air Force

Introduction

Some hypothetical crises

Mutual mistrust is likely to characterize a cyber crisis

States may have room for maneuver in a cyber crisis

A note on methodology

Purpose and organization

Avoiding crises by creating norms

What kind of norms might be useful?

Enforce laws against hacking

Disassociate from freelance hackers

Discourage commercial espionage

Be careful about the obligation to suppress cyber traffic

How do we enforce norms?

Confidence-building measures

Norms for victims of cyberattacks

Norms for war?

Deception

Military necessity and collateral damage

Proportionality

Reversibility

Conclusions

Narratives, dialogue, and signals

Narratives to promote control

A narrative framework for cyberspace

Victimization, attribution, retaliation, and aggression

Victimization

Attribution

Retaliation

Aggression

Emollients: narratives to walk back a crisis

We did nothing

Well, at least not on our orders

It was an accident

This is nothing new

At least it does not portend anything

Broader considerations

Signals

Ambiguity in signaling

Signaling resolve

Signaling that cyber combat is not kinetic combat

Conclusions

Escalation management

Motives for escalation

Does escalation matter?

Escalation risks

Escalation risks in phase

Escalation risks for contained local conflicts

Escalation risks for uncontained conflicts

Managing proxy cyberattacks

What hidden combatants imply for horizontal escalation

Managing overt proxy conflict

The difficulties of tit-for-tat management

The importance of pre-planning

Disjunctions among effort, effect, and perception

Inadvertent escalation

Escalation into kinetic warfare

Escalation into economic warfare

Sub rosa escalation

Managing the third-party problem

The need for a clean shot

Inference and narrative

Command and control

Commanders

Those they command

Conclusions

Implications for strategic stability

Translating sources of cold war instability to cyberspace

What influence can cyberwar have if nuclear weapons exist?

Can cyberwar disarm another state's nuclear capabilities?

Can cyberwar disarm another states cyberwarriors?

Does cyberwar lend itself to alert-reaction cycles?

Are cyberdefenses inherently destabilizing?

Would a cyberspace arms races be destabilizing?

Misperception as a source of crisis

Side takes great exception to cyberespionage

Defenses are misinterpreted as preparations for war

Too much confidence in attribution

Too much confidence in or fear of pre-emption

Supposedly risk-free cyberattacks

Neutrality

Conclusions

Can cyber crises be managed?

A. Distributed denial-of-service attacks

B. Overt, obvious, and covert cyberattacks and responses

Can good cyberdefenses discourage attacks?

Bibliography

Figures

Figure 1: Alternative postures for a master cyber narrative

Figure 2: Sources of imprecision in tit for tat

Figure 3: An inadvertent path to mutual escalation

Figure A-1: Configuring networks to limit the damage of DDoS attacks

Table

Overt, obvious, and covert cyberattacks and responses.