Crisis and escalation in cyberspace / / Martin C. Libicki.

• Author: Libicki, Martin C.
• Place / Publishing House: Santa Monica, CA : : RAND, Project Air Force,, 2012.
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (199 pages) :; illustrations (some color)
• Notes: "Prepared for the United States Air Force."; "Approved for public release; distribution unlimited."

Table of Contents

• 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.