December 19, 2024 — This Fall Edition of The Cyber Defense Review is largely influenced by the need for all of us to reimagine the future. How do we help create positions of relative advantage in competition while also preparing for future crisis and conflict? Reimagining the future requires our community to expand our thinking to understand more of the world around us and how our great power rivals are leveraging information, the electromagnetic spectrum, and cyberspace to build power. We hope the articles presented here increase your knowledge, expand your understanding, and make you think about how to compete and win in the future. MORE
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December 19, 2024 — Battle space is increasingly transparent. This transparency includes not only electronic signatures but also other actors in the environment. Cell phones today make the movement of military troops and equipment particularly problematic. In order to safely maneuver on the future battlefield, this article proposes the development of a cyber smoke screen. Unfortunately, such a smoke screen, while defensive in nature, would require temporary disruption of local internet and cellular access, thereby bringing this essential defensive maneuver under offensive cyber operations, which implicates both strategic and moral concerns. MORE
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December 19, 2024 — The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) modernization strategy follows three overlapping phases: mechanization, informatization, and intelligentization. Mechanization, aimed to be broadly completed by 2020, focused on incorporating advanced machinery, vehicles, and equipment. The informatization phase introduced networks, information systems, and data to all aspects of military operations, including command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and cyber operations. Since 2019, while still pursuing the aims of informatization, intelligentization endeavors to incorporate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum, big data, virtual and augmented reality, cloud computing, autonomous systems, and the internet of things (IoT). Recent PLA writings describe the culmination of intelligentization as leading to "Metaverse War" or Meta-War. In this vision, the metaverse becomes central not only to China's broader societal transformation under “Digital China” (the world’s first digital grand strategy)—which aims at “winning the future”—but also a defining feature of future warfare. PLA literature has extensively explored building a military metaverse, or “battleverse,” and is now focused not only on how metaverse wars will be fought, but also how they will be won spanning both near- and long-term time horizons. MORE
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December 19, 2024 — The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has engaged in an aggressive media campaign, using classified data leaks exposing controversial U.S. cyber activities to paint it as a cyber hegemon. This effort has dovetailed with other influence operations in an effort to frame the U.S. as an untrustworthy global partner motivated by its own self-interests ahead of the global community. The U.S. Department of State released a recent report on these activities, correctly concluding that they have had questionable successes. However, the PRC is using these campaigns not so much as to supplant the U.S. as a global leader, but rather to keep it in check by raising questions in the minds of those nations not already bound to the U.S. to not blindly follow Washington’s lead. The PRC seeks to capitalize on this to press forward on core political and economic issues, which if achieved, could put the PRC closer to its goals as an influencing global leader. MORE
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December 19, 2024 — This article examines the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in disinformation campaigns during the 2024 Taiwan presidential election, with a focus on the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) tactics and Taiwan’s countermeasures. PRC state and non-state actors utilized GenAI to produce subtle and less detectable disinformation, including deepfakes and biased language models. Taiwan’s curated response to PRC-affiliated information threats feature legislative actions, media literacy initiatives, and development of its own GenAI tools, such as the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) language model, to safeguard its cultural values. Despite the PRC’s efforts, Taiwanese sentiment toward the PRC remains largely neutral or negative, demonstrating resilience in Taiwan’s democratic processes. The study further explores the global implications of GenAI in disinformation campaigns, drawing parallels with Russian tactics and examining the role of U.S. technology firms in countering these threats. Taiwan’s multifaceted response offers valuable insights for other democracies facing similar challenges in the evolving landscape of information warfare. MORE
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December 19, 2024 — Information exchange between systems relies on secure implementation of Application Program Interfaces (APIs). This is especially true for modern Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) efforts. Unfortunately, many mission-critical
systems implement APIs with programming languages that are not memory safe.
We discuss how the use of these inherently insecure languages creates strategic
and tactical risk for Department of Defense (DoD) command and control, artificial
intelligence, and legacy systems. Furthermore, we present a set of recommendations for migrating to modern programming languages or mitigating risks from languages that lack memory safety.
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December 19, 2024 — The United States, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and Russia are engaged in strategic competition below the threshold of armed conflict. Cyberspace is its principal medium. America’s relative power stature is under non-stop cyber duress from these rivals. Protecting America’s three main peacetime power sinews – its economic edge; domestic political cohesion and electoral system confidence; and public trust in protection of personal privacy and security – from the subversive and corrosive cyber activities by Great Power rivals requires an array of U.S. government agencies, especially the U.S. military. The new era of Great Power strategic competition has fragmented the internet and rendered inadequate America’s historical preference
for an orderly, law-based framework that manages cyber-competition. The U.S. needs to focus on a Relative Power Erosion Framework featuring persistent engagement and a hunt forward posture. USCYBERCOM-led cyber campaigns are necessary in the short-term for effective American strategic cyber competition. In the longer-term, unique American military capabilities for persistent cyber engagement should be replaced with those in selected civilian governmental agencies more befitting of a ‘new normal’ for endemic cyber-competitive interactions among the Great Powers. MORE
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July 30, 2024 — In an age where digital data reigns supreme, its safeguarding and strategic utilization have become paramount to maintaining effective cybersecurity. This special edition of The Cyber Defense Review delves into the multifaceted roles that data plays within the cybersecurity landscape, offering a comprehensive exploration of emerging technologies, innovative frameworks, and strategic approaches to enhance data security and leverage its potential. MORE
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July 30, 2024 — There are significant opportunities and challenges ahead for our people and teams, as well as for our future operations and technologies. Future cyber forces will neither resemble nor operate like today’s forces. Operational concepts are changing. We are experiencing revolutionary changes in technology, and much of that change applies both to the government and commercial sectors and can be used for good or evil. Thus, this note is a call for every cyber leader to exercise the fundamentals of leadership to ensure that our cyber force into the future will remain unequaled. MORE
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July 30, 2024 — Data pollution is the degradation of the digital environment by data that can be considered as waste or a nuisance. These data can be naturally produced by digital systems for their operation or linked to human activities in the digital space. Data pollution is likely to affect the health of digital systems leading to degradation or interference with operations in cyberspace. The battle against data pollution can be won through the optimization of data processing. MORE
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