Despite the maturing of the cyber domain as an important area of contestation and conflict vector, there are no truly multilateral conventions governing cyber operations and cyberconflict in terms of national and military security. This is problematic because a lack of norms both (a) incentivizes predatory behaviour and (b) increases risks of misperception, misunderstanding, cybersecurity dilemmas, and conflict escalation. In this context, this chapter provides a cyber threat landscape and analyses strategic competition and conflict among selected states in East Asia (the US, China, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, Russia) via the cyber domain. Following that, this chapter applies offence-defence theory to the cyber domain in order to predict states’ likely cyberspace behaviour. To this end, the chapter argues that the cyber domain is offence dominant, leading to increased risks of escalatory chainganging. Flowing from this analysis, the chapter seeks to determine what kinds of international cooperation could reduce this escalatory cyber tendency, and how the EU is cooperating with like-minded states such as South Korea to reduce cyber threats.
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For example, UN 1st Committee on ITU and 2021 76th session on Agenda item 95 (Developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security); 2001 Convention on Cybercrime; EU Directive on NIS Security; NATO Tallinn Manuals and others mentioned in this volume.
Charles Glaser and Chaim Kaufmann (1998). “What is the Offense-Defense Balance and Can We Measure It?” International Security 22(4): 44–82; Keir Lieber (2011). “Mission Impossible: Measuring the Offense-Defense Balance with Net Military Balance.” Security Studies 20: 451–459; Rebecca Slayton (2017). “What Is the Cyber Offense-Defense Balance? Conceptions, Causes, and Assessment.” International Security 41(3): 72–109.
Thomas Christensen and Jack Snyder (1990). “Chained Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity.” International Organization 44(2): 137–168.
For systems relying on software—especially in the security/defence sector, as well as critical systems—one strategy is to target software elements that go into a facility’s operating system, without the software’s users being aware that the software supply chain was compromised.
Meir Kalech (2019). “Cyber-attack detection in SCADA systems using temporal pattern recognition techniques.” Computers and Security 84 (July): 225–238.
Ibid. Slayton (2017) argues that cost is not a critical factor in the cyber offence-defence balance, as the relative costs of both aspects of the domain are very low. She also shows that offensive cost itself is not monotonic, but depends on the objective. A standard hacking operation favours offence on cost grounds, but a complex operation (e.g., Stuxnet) is very expensive.
Mason Richey (2019). “US-led Alliances and Contemporary International Security Disorder: Comparative Responses of the Transatlantic and Asia-Pacific Alliance Systems.” Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs 6(3): 275–298.
Mason Richey (2020). “Alliance Politics and Policy in the Multipolar Indo-Asia-Pacific: The Hub-and-Spokes System Between Buckpassing and Chainganging.” The International Spectator 55(1): 1–17.
United States Department of Defense (DOD) (2018). 2018 Cyber Strategy and Cyber Posture Review; Ellen Nakashima (2018). “White House Authorizes ‘Offensive Cyber Operations’ to Deter Foreign Adversaries.” Washington Post (September 20); Jeff Kosseff (2019). “The Contours of ‘Defend Forward’ Under International Law.” 2019 11th International Conference on Cyber Conflict. (June). (https://ccdcoe.org/uploads/2019/06/Art_17_The-Contours-of-Defend-Forward.pdf).
Fiona Cunningham (2018). Maximizing leverage: explaining China’s strategic force postures in limited wars. PhD dissertation (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). (https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/121602).
Karsten Friis and Jens Ringsmose (2016). Conflict in Cyberspace: Theoretical, strategic, and legal perspectives. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge); Buchanan and Williams (2018); Jinghua (2019); CSIS (2019).
United Nations Group of Government Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security (GGE), and Open Ended Working Group (OEWG). Its final output is a 2021 report on cyber norms, notably for hacking of critical infrastructure: United Nations (2021). Report of the Group of Governmental Experts on Advancing responsible State behavior in cyberspace in the context of international security (https://front.un-arm.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/final-report-2019-2021-gge-1-advance-copy.pdf).