Cyber Warfare and US National Security by Ari Basen
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Cyber Warfare and US National Security By Ari Basen ! USAF Network Operations Command Center at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas ! ! Senior Capstone Advisor: Prof Boaz Atzili School of International Service University Honors in International Studies ! Spring 2014 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Table of Contents! ! Acknowledgements i! ! Abstract ii! ! Introduction 2! ! Scope and Purpose 5 ! ! Research Design 6! ! Literature of Cyber Warfare 7! ! Clausewitz and Cyber War 12! ! Deterrence and Cyber Warfare 17 ! ! Compellence and Cyber Warfare 20! ! Cyber as a Strategic Weapon 24! ! Cyber as a Component to Electronic Warfare 29! ! Virtual Warfare 35! ! Principles of Cyber Warfare 41! ! Conclusions 48 ! ! Further Reading 49 ! ! Glossary of Selected Terms 50 ! ! !Works Cited 52! Acknowledgements! ! ! I would like to thank Professor Davy Banks for his numerous hours of advice and counsel during this project and without whom this Capstone would be far cry from it is today.! ! !I would also like to thank Emma Humphreys for her boundless patience in dealing with me through all the long nights as I worked on this project and who also tolerated going through all 24,000 words of this Capstone in order to make sure it was !proofread before submission. ! !I want to thank and apologize to Professor Boaz Atzili who certainly did not fully comprehend what he was signing up for when he took on the position as Capstone Advisor. I apologize in advance because this piece is double the length required for a Master’s thesis and nearly 25% of the way towards the length of Doctoral dissertation. I implore you not to hold this against me as you! grade this monster of a paper. ! ! i ! Abstract! !Talk of cyber attack and cyber warfare abound within the public discourse. Cases such as Russia’s cyber attacks on Estonia Georgia, the American/Israeli Stuxnet operation, and China’s incessant breaches of US networks are held up as examples of the ongoing ‘war’ within cyberspace. Senior policy makers from the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security have made dire warnings of a imminent “cyber Pearl Harbor” or “cyber 9/11” yet to date there has yet to be a cyber attack which has killed anyone.1 The purpose of this Capstone is to cut through the bellicose rhetoric and to examine the emergent phenomenon known as “cyber warfare.” This piece uses established strategic thought and military doctrine as a foundation to analyze the place of cyber operations within the broader spectrum of military operations. This piece applies a diverse set of military theories from deterrence to strategic airpower to electronic warfare doctrine in order to establish a theoretic understanding of cyber warfare. This Capstone concludes with a set of Principles of Cyberwarfare which summarizes the observations made and should serve to ground future discussions of the topic. " 1 Rid ii Introduction! ! ! War has been a function of humanity since its inception as a sentient species. Warfare has long served as a catalyst for technological development and a driver of societal change. With every new domain discovered, we have invented new tools to capitalize on this discovery and spread our conquering spirit. From stones and spears to UAVs and ICBMs, humanity has sought to extend the distance of its lethal reach. The technology may have matured exponentially but the primal impulse to use violence to !propagate our will has remained eternal. ! !What we know today as the Internet was originally conceived by the scientists of the Defense Advanced Researched Project Agency as an open source, self organizing means to build and maintain the military command and control network in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. This ARPANet or Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, was developed in the early 1970s to connect and process the tremendous amount of data gathered from the hundreds of radar stations spread across the North American continent. This early network fed data into a primary processing and early warning center buried into the Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, which would become !the headquarters of NORAD and today’s US Strategic Command.2 ! !Computer scientists at various institutions began to apply this networking concept to their own work as a means to automatically connect, process, and share their research with other academics spread across the country. This network of academic institutions would evolve in the 1980s into a system maintained by the National Science Foundation known as the NSFNET.3 Outside of this academic environment, the first real commercial application of computer networks was to link together the various banks across the country in order to automate the processing of bank checks.4 These two networks would evolve and grow internationally over the course of the next decade to become the commercial Internet of today, which was not released publicly until 1995.5 The public commercial Internet would go onto grow over the next 20 years to become an integral fixture in lives of 2.5 billion people and it is actively growing still and at an accelerating rate.6 Today, there are roughly 10 billion networked devices in the world and it is projected that by mid-century this number will grow to 50 billion devices, !marshaling in an age known as the “Internet of Everything.”7 ! 2 “Public Key Cryptography: What is it?” 3 "The Internet - The Launch of NSFNET." 4 “Public Key Cryptography: What is it?” 5 "The Internet - The Launch of NSFNET." 6 "World Internet Users Statistics Usage and World Population Stats." 7 "The Computer Guy", Eli. #2 !The first malicious act launched against the Internet was committed by Robert Morris, a student of Cornell University, in 1988. This worm was originally designed as a test intended to map the Internet. However, as an untended side effect, as it propagated across the numerous machines connected to the Internet, it drained their computing resources to the point they crashed and became unusable.8 This worm would be the first of billions to have an adverse effect usability of a networked system and the people who !use them. ! !As banks, merchants, and entrepreneurs flocked to the open pastures of the Internet, the wolves of the population soon followed. These hackers sought to prey upon a naive public to steal financial information, intellectual property, and even state secrets for their own gain. As individuals, companies, and even nations outsourced their operations and infrastructure to computer networks, it created a strategic vulnerability which could be exploited by any adversary with sufficient knowledge of computer systems. Thus The original floppy disk which the Morris Worm was launched from the field of cyber security evolved in order to ensure the MIT, Circa. 1988. On Display at the confidentially, integrity, and availability of data and the systems which use it.9 However, this exceptionally broad field comprises everything from a bored teenager defacing some websites to a rival nation-state compromising the integrity US government’s Joint Worldwide Information Communications System (JWICS) which forms the digital backbone for all classified US !government communications rated Top Secret and above.10 ! ! The US military, and the militaries of any developed country, rely on data networks for everything from command and control to target acquisition for guided munitions. An attack which compromised the US military’s NIPRNet which controls the bulk of the DoD’s logistical routing could significantly degrade the DoD’s operational effectiveness worldwide.11 A scheming adversary could use an attack against the NIPRNet to upend the supply chain to a warzone, sending toothbrushes to troops instead of ammunition.12 Penetrating the SIPRNet which is used to carry classified information like operational orders would allow an adversary to eavesdrop on troop 8 Keyhoe. 9 See Glossary for the meaning and a discussion of these terms. ! Singer, p. 35 10 Priest. (Kindle Edition) Location 4609. 11 NIPRNet=Non-Secure Internet Protocol Routing Network. See:"NIPRNet Definition from PC Magazine Encyclopedia." 12 Singer p. 131 #3 movements and even potentially issue erroneous orders.13 This type of attack on the integrity and confidentiality of these networks would shake the trust of the users reliant on them. Even after the malware has been removed the system, the commanding officer may decide that he cannot rely on this system and scrap it entirely in favor of “old school” communications methods such as infrared light pulses in morse code or even all the way back to message couriers.! !! !The United States and its NATO allies are not alone in their reliance on computer networks for the continuity of their operations. China, Russia, Iran, and other potential nation-state adversaries all use TCP/IP based networks for their communications and operations as this represents the primary set of rules by which digital information is sent and received across the globe.14 Non-state threat actors from al Qaeda, the Sinaloa Cartel of Mexico, and the Russian Business Network15 all use the Internet to enhance of their operations: be it spreading propaganda, synchronizing the shipments of cocaine, or distributing malware which steals credit card information. The open, free, and ad hoc design of the Internet allows anyone, regardless of their intent or affiliation, to gain access to this domain in order to advance their respective agenda. This creates a constellation of potential adversaries across an incredibly diverse spectrum of intentions !and capabilities. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 13 SIPRNet= Secret Internet Protocol Routing Network. See: "NIPRNet Definition from PC Magazine Encyclopedia." 14 TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. It describes a suite of protocols for how packets of information are routed across the globe from the MacBook Pro this paper was written on all the way up to the massive server farms employed by the tech giants of Apple, Google, and Microsoft.