Monthly Archives: June 2020

Accelerated Warfare, Artificial Intelligence, Innovation

For ethical artificial intelligence, security is pivotal

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The market for artificial intelligence is growing at an unprecedented speed, not seen since the introduction of the commercial Internet. The estimates vary, but the global AI market is assumed to grow 30 to 60 percent per year. Defense spending on AI projects is increasing at even a higher rate when we add wearable AI and systems that are dependent on AI. The defense investments, such as augmented reality, automated target recognition, and tactical robotics, would not advance at today’s rate without the presence of AI to support the realization of these concepts.

The beauty of the economy is responsiveness. With an identified “buy” signal, the market works to satisfy the need from the buyer. Powerful buy signals lead to rapid development, deployment, and roll-out of solutions, knowing that time to market matters.

My concern is based on earlier analogies when the time to market prevailed over conflicting interests. One example is the first years of the commercial internet, the introduction of remote control of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and manufacturing, and the rapid growth of the smartphone apps. In each of these cases, security was not the first thing on the developer’s mind. Time to market was the priority. This exposure increases with an economically sound pursuit to use commercial off the shelf products (COTS) as sensors, chipsets, functions, electric controls, and storage devices can be bought on the civilian market for a fraction of the cost. These COTS products cut costs, give the American people more defense and security for the money, and drive down the time to conclude the development and deployment cycle.

The Department of Defense has adopted five ethical principles for the department’s future utilization of AI. These principles are: responsible, equitable, traceable, reliable, and governable. The common denominator in all these five principles is cybersecurity. If the cybersecurity of the AI application is inadequate, these five adopted principles can be jeopardized and no longer steer the DOD AI implementation.

The future AI implementation increases the attack surface radically, and of concern is the ability to detect manipulation of the processes, because, for the operators, the underlying AI processes are not clearly understood or monitored. A system that detects targets from images or from a streaming video capture, where AI is used to identify target signatures, will generate decision support that can lead to the destruction of these targets. The targets are engaged and neutralized. One of the ethical principles for AI is “responsible.” How do we ensure that the targeting is accurate? How do we safeguard that neither the algorithm is corrupt or that sensors are not being tampered with to produce spurious data? It becomes a matter of security.

In a larger conflict, where ground forces are not able to inspect the effects on the ground, the feedback loop that invalidates the decisions supported by AI might not reach the operators in weeks. Or it might surface after the conflict is over. A rogue system can likely produce spurious decision support for longer than we are willing to admit.

Of all the five principles “equitable” is the area of highest human control. Even if controlling embedded biases in a process is hard to detect, it is within our reach. “Reliable” relates directly to security because it requires that the systems maintain confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

If the principle “reliable” requires cybersecurity vetting and testing, we have to realize that these AI systems are part of complex technical structures with a broad attack surface. If the principle “reliable” is jeopardized, then “traceable” becomes problematic, because if the integrity of AI is questionable, it is not a given that “relevant personnel possess an appropriate understanding of the technology.”

The principle “responsible” can still be valid, because deployed personnel make sound and ethical decisions based on the information provided even if a compromised system will feed spurious information to the decisionmaker. The principle “governable” acts as a safeguard against “unintended consequences.” The unknown is the time from when unintended consequences occur and until the operators of the compromised system understand that the system is compromised.

It is evident when a target that should be hit is repeatedly missed. The effects can be observed. If the effects can not be observed, it is no longer a given that that “unintended consequences” are identified, especially in a fluid multi-domain battlespace. A compromised AI system for target acquisition can mislead targeting, acquiring hidden non-targets that are a waste of resources and weapon system availability, exposing the friendly forces for detection. The time to detect such a compromise can be significant.

My intention is to visualize that cybersecurity is pivotal for AI success. I do not doubt that AI will play an increasing role in national security. AI is a top priority in the United States and to our friendly foreign partners, but potential adversaries will make the pursuit of finding ways to compromise these systems a top priority of their own.

Cyber Defense, Cyber Resiliency

What COVID-19 can teach us about cyber resilience

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Dr. Jan Kallberg and Col. Stephen Hamilton
March 23, 2020

The COVID pandemic is a challenge that will eventually create health risks to Americans and have long-lasting effects. For many, this is a tragedy, a threat to life, health, and finances. What draws our attention is what COVID-19 has meant our society, the economy, and how in an unprecedented way, family, corporations, schools, and government agencies quickly had to adjust to a new reality. Why does this matter from a cyber perspective?

COVID-19 has created increased stress on our logistic, digital, public, and financial systems and this could in fact resemble what a major cyber conflict would mean to the general public. It is also essential to assess what matters to the public during this time. COVID-19 has created a widespread disruption of work, transportation, logistics, distribution of food and necessities to the public, and increased stress on infrastructures, from Internet connectivity to just-in-time delivery. It has unleashed abnormal behaviors.

A potential adversary will likely not have the ability to take down an entire sector of our critical infrastructure, or business eco-system, for several reasons. First, awareness and investments in cybersecurity have drastically increased the last two decades. This in turn reduced the number of single points of failure and increased the number of built-in redundancies as well as the ability to maintain operations in a degraded environment.

Second, the time and resources required to create what was once referred to as a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” is beyond the reach of any near-peer nation. Decades of advancement, from increasing resilience, adding layered defense and the new ability to detect intrusion, have made it significantly harder to execute an attack of that size.

Instead, an adversary will likely focus their primary cyber capacity on what matters for their national strategic goals. For example, delaying the movement of the main U.S. force from the continental United States to theater by using a cyberattack on utilities, airports, railroads, and ports. That strategy has two clear goals: to deny United States and its allies options in theater due to a lack of strength and to strike a significant blow to the United States and allied forces early in the conflict. If an adversary can delay U.S. forces’ arrival in theater or create disturbances in thousands of groceries or wreak havoc on the commute for office workers, they will likely prioritize what matters to their military operations first.

That said, in a future conflict, the domestic businesses, local government, and services on which the general public rely on, will be targeted by cyberattacks. These second-tier operations are likely exploiting the vulnerabilities at scale in our society, but with less complexity and mainly opportunity exploitations.

The similarity with the COVID-19 outbreak to a cyber campaign is the disruption in logistics and services, how the population reacts, as well as the stress it puts on law enforcement and first responders. These events can lead to questions about the ability to maintain law and order and the ability to prevent destabilization of a distribution chain that is built for just-in-time operations with minimal margins of deviation before it falls apart.

The sheer nature of these second-tier attacks is unsystematic, opportunity-driven. The goal is to pursue disruption, confusion, and stress. An authoritarian regime would likely not be hindered by international norms to attack targets that jeopardize public health and create risks for the general population. Environmental hazards released by these attacks can lead to risks of loss of life and potential dramatic long-term loss of life quality for citizens. If the population questions the government’s ability to protect, the government’s legitimacy and authority will suffer. Health and environmental risks tend to appeal not only to our general public’s logic but also to emotions, particularly uncertainty and fear. This can be a tipping point if the population fears the future to the point it loses confidence in the government.

Therefore, as we see COVID-19 unfold, it could give us insights into how a broad cyber-disruption campaign could affect the U.S. population. Terrorist experts examine two effects of an attack – the attack itself and the consequences of how the target population reacts.

Likely, our potential adversaries study carefully how our society reacts to COVID-19. For example, if the population obeys the government, if our government maintains control and enforces its agenda and if the nation was prepared.

Lessons learned from COVID-19 are applicable for the strengthening U.S. cyberdefense and resilience. These unfortunate events increase our understanding of how a broad cyber campaign can disrupt and degrade the quality of life, government services, and business activity.

Accelerated Warfare, Cyber Defense, Humanitarian Cyber Operations

Why Iran would avoid a major cyberwar

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Demonstrations in Iran last year and signs of the regime’s demise raise a question: What would the strategic outcome be of a massive cyber engagement with a foreign country or alliance?

Authoritarian regimes traditionally put survival first. Those who do not prioritize regime survival tend to collapse. Authoritarian regimes are always vulnerable because they are illegitimate. There will always be loyalists that benefit from the system, but for a significant part of people, the regime is not legit. The regime only exists because they suppress popular will and use force against any opposition.

In 2016, I wrote an article in the Cyber Defense Review titled “Strategic Cyberwar Theory – A Foundation for Designing Decisive Strategic Cyber Operations.” The utility of strategic cyberwar is linked to the institutional stability of the targeted state. If a nation is destabilized, it can be subdued to foreign will and the ability for the current regime to execute their strategy is evaporated due to loss of internal authority and ability. The theory’s predictive power is most potent when applied to target theocracies, authoritarian regimes, and dysfunctional experimental democracies because the common tenet is weak institutions.

Fully functional democracies, on the other hand, have a definite advantage because these advanced democracies have stability and, by their citizenry, accepted institutions. Nations openly adversarial to democracies are in most cases, totalitarian states that are close to entropy. The reason why these totalitarian states are under their current regime is the suppression of the popular will. Any removal of the pillars of repression, by destabilizing the regime design and institutions that make it functional, will release the popular will.

A destabilized — and possibly imploding — Iranian regime is a more tangible threat to the ruling theocratic elite than any military systems being hacked in a cyber interchange. Dictators fear the wrath of the masses. Strategic cyberwar theory seeks to look beyond the actual digital interchange, the cyber tactics, and instead create a predictive power of how a decisive cyber conflict should be conducted in pursuit of national strategic goals.

The Iranian military apparatus is a mix of traditional military defense, crowd control, political suppression, and show of force for generating artificial internal authority in the country. If command and control evaporate in the military apparatus, it also removes the ability to control the population to the degree the Iranian regime have been able until now to do. In that light, what is in it for Iran to launch a massive cyber engagement against the free world? What can they win?

If the free world uses its cyber abilities, it is far more likely that Iran itself gets destabilized and falls into entropy and chaos, which could lead to lead to major domestic bloodshed when the victims of 40 years of violent suppression decide the fate of their oppressors. It would not be the intent of the free world, it is just an outfall of the way the Iranian totalitarian regime has acted toward their own people. The risks for the Iranians are far more significant than the potential upside of being able to inflict damage on the free world.

That doesn’t mean Iranians would not try to hack systems in foreign countries they consider adversarial. Because of the Iranian regime’s constant need to feed their internal propaganda machinery with “victories,” that is more likely to take place on a smaller scale and will likely be uncoordinated low-level attacks seeking to exploit opportunities they come across. In my view, far more dangerous are non-Iranian advanced nation-state cyber actors that impersonate being Iranian hackers trying to make aggressive preplanned attacks under cover of spoofed identity and transferring the blame fueled by recent tensions.