Potential Adversaries Research Articles

Human Target Selected by The Adverse Intelligence Services for Obtaining Classified Information

Abstract Generally, to be competitive, the intelligence services are required, by their status itself, to constantly assess the capacity and performance and also to anticipate the behaviour of potential adversaries in achieving and maintaining a superior informational advantage. Illegal access of adverse intelligence services to national information strategy is a well defined aim, involving carefully designed scenarios and continuous assessment, performed by specialized structures. In the economy of intelligence business, a logical condition is the selection of human intelligence sources, primarily among those whose professional duties involve access to valuable information, the disclosure of which may be established strategic advantages. The results are often negative immediate or medium-term consequences , unpredictable, both on national security and on a proper functioning of the state.

Employing Military Force in the 21st Century

ABSTRACT: As various states assert power more aggressively, US policymakers should apply lessons from past uses of force while developing strategic plans to manage the global and national tolerance for violence. In the smoking wreckage of Hitler's Berlin and in the burned out ruins of Tokyo, the old world order disappeared. The geostrategic context of international relations and power radically changed, bringing new challenges, trends, and patterns. Globalism, the survival and triumph of market capitalism, the end of colonialism, and the threat of communism, all under the haunting shadow of nuclear weapons, confronted the survivors of World War II and those who followed. In the emerging new world order, the United States stood as the most powerful nation on earth, if not in history. The end of World War II brought a strategic inflection point not only for the world but for the United States specifically--what would America do with its power? In retrospect, the United States managed the emerging challenges fairly well--the world survived. Since 1945, the United States has found it necessary to exercise its power, to use force in the pursuit of its national interests and those of its allies, but has realized mixed results. After successfully defeating the Axis powers during World War II and winning the Cold War, why has the United States had trouble applying its overwhelming military advantage? In the ledger of US military force applied in Korea, Europe, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, is there something beyond the role of policymakers or the unique strategic context of each conflict that explains success or failure? The answers lie in understanding the actual utility of force--the amount and scale of force necessary to achieve desired political control--and in understanding the lingering problems of America's use of force in an era dominated by limited war. This era continued beyond the end of the Cold War, and many suggest, progressed to a period of limited wars characterized by nonstate actors, networked insurgencies, and new or resurgent state actors, all of which contribute to persistent conflict and challenge regional stability. (1 )The nature of this period may not necessarily alter the utility of force since force has been used successfully to assure, deter, coerce, and compel. Such reasoning, however, depends on a close assessment of our interests and objectives as well as those of our adversaries. Policymakers must understand what military force can accomplish, and once the decision to apply military power is made, remain cognizant of its inherent constraints. America's application of military force in an age of limited war is invariably shaped by the asymmetry of interests between the United States and its potential adversaries, the fluctuation of political will during the conflict, and the challenges of building partner capacity. A better understanding of the nature of the utility of force and its relationship to several key limiting factors can help us develop and execute more appropriate strategies. The Utility of Force: Assure, Deter, Coerce, and Compel For allies, force may be used to influence behavior by providing assurance--the visible result of security. Sir Michael Howard, a preeminent British historian, claimed the West's use of force assured the global economy of safe passage to win the Cold War. (3) Howard's view of the Cold War as a largely economic struggle testing the viability of communism versus capitalism meant American force was deployed globally to secure trade--it takes force to assure the global commons. Assurance through forward presence and stationing has been the essence of regional stability in much of the world. Achieved through forward presence and global military capabilities, assurance also provides political leverage, giving substance to diplomacy, credibility, and international agreements. Generally positive, assurance descends on a scale of the potential use of force in which it becomes deterrence. …

Strategies of legitimation in Central Asia: regime durability in Turkmenistan

ABSTRACTLocated in current debates on one party dictatorships and regime durability, this article explores continuity and disruptions within the Turkmen political elite in their transition from presidents Saparmurat Niyazov (1991–2006) to Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov (2007-). We are particularly interested in how the change from an idiosyncratic system, based mainly on president Niyazov's personality cult and visible repression of potential opponents, evolved into a more refined system under his successor, Berdymuhamedov. We will thus look at regime efforts to re-brand Turkmenistan without substantially changing the domestic political structures and dynamics. These include the manufacture of ‘opposition parties’ and holding of formal elections every five years while retaining absolute control over the most important political aspects of the country. We suggest the existence of a two-fold strategy to maintain the status quo based on authoritarian tendencies and learning. Whilst the shift from the first to the second president has brought significant changes, it also demonstrates essential continuities that helped the formation of an official domestic and international narrative proclaiming commitment to a number of international standards and national values; and strict control of most, if not all, aspects of national political life.

Towards Choosing Authentication and Encryption: Communication Security in Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are composed of provide low powered, inexpensive distributed devices which can be deployed over enormous physical spaces. Coordination between sensor devices is required to achieve a common communication. In low cost, low power and short-range wireless environment, sensor networks cope with significant resource constraints. Security is one of main issues in wireless sensor networks because of potential adversaries. Several security protocols and models have been implemented for communication on computing devices but deployment these models and protocols into the sensor networks is not easy because of the resource constraints mentioned. Memory intensive encryption algorithms as well as high volume of packet transmission cannot be applied to sensor devices due to its low computational speed and memory. Deployment of sensor networks without security mechanism makes sensor nodes vulnerable to potential attacks. Therefore, attackers compromise the network to accept malicious sensor nodes as legitimate nodes. This paper provides the different security models as a metric, which can then be used to make pertinent security decisions for securing wireless sensor network communication.

The ambiguity challenge: Why the world needs a multilateral nuclear cruise missile agreement

ABSTRACTThe US long-range standoff (LRSO) weapon program is clearly a major factor in the worldwide trend toward fielding nuclear-armed cruise missiles. Public information shows that it will likely have new abilities beyond its predecessor air-launched cruise missile, and these potential properties, and the fact that the Air Force intends to field it on its new stealth bomber, may raise new concerns among potential adversaries and alter strategic calculations. The US nuclear modernization plan, as of this writing, includes replacing the existing stock of 575 air-launched cruise missiles with around 1000 LRSO weapons. The concerns surrounding the LRSO are feeding the emergence of a serious debate in the United States over its future, and whether a move to end the program could help tilt other countries away from nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

SQC: secure quality control for meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies

Due to the limited power of small-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS), researchers tend to collaborate and establish a larger consortium in order to perform large-scale GWAS. Genome-wide association meta-analysis (GWAMA) is a statistical tool that aims to synthesize results from multiple independent studies to increase the statistical power and reduce false-positive findings of GWAS. However, it has been demonstrated that the aggregate data of individual studies are subject to inference attacks, hence privacy concerns arise when researchers share study data in GWAMA. In this article, we propose a secure quality control (SQC) protocol, which enables checking the quality of data in a privacy-preserving way without revealing sensitive information to a potential adversary. SQC employs state-of-the-art cryptographic and statistical techniques for privacy protection. We implement the solution in a meta-analysis pipeline with real data to demonstrate the efficiency and scalability on commodity machines. The distributed execution of SQC on a cluster of 128 cores for one million genetic variants takes less than one hour, which is a modest cost considering the 10-month time span usually observed for the completion of the QC procedure that includes timing of logistics. SQC is implemented in Java and is publicly available at https://github.com/acs6610987/secureqc. jean-pierre.hubaux@epfl.ch. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

A Graph-Theoretic Characterization of Perfect Attackability for Secure Design of Distributed Control Systems

This paper considers secure design in distributed control systems to ensure the detection of stealthy integrity attacks. Distributed control systems consist of many heterogeneous components, such as sensors, controllers, and actuators and may contain several independent agents. The presence of many components and agents in a system increases the attack surfaces for potential adversaries, making distributed control systems vulnerable to malicious behavior. The goal of this paper is to consider the design of distributed control systems to ensure the deterministic detection of attacks. To do this, we leverage existing results which relate the deterministic detection of a fixed set of malicious nodes to structural left invertibility. We extend the notion of structural left invertibility to consider attacks from all possible sets of malicious nodes using vertex separators. Vertex separators are then used to solve optimization problems which aim to minimize communication networks while also ensuring that a resource limited adversary cannot generate perfect attacks. Optimal bounds on communication and sensing are obtained and polynomial time design algorithms are provided.

Second acts in cyberspace

Cyberattacks depend, to a large extent on surprise. Because they do, the efficacy of their attacks may well fall sharply after the outset of an extended campaign – although that is not entirely bad news if some of the adjustments made to minimize future damage are themselves damaging (e.g., not trusting information that was once corrupted). Nevertheless, if cyberwarriors wish to maintain their relevance over the course of some future military campaign they need to understand how adversaries are likely to react to the first wave of cyberattacks. Furthermore, if cyberwarriors are to fulfill their defensive roles, it may help to understand how their own non-cyber colleagues are apt to react, the better to prioritize the assistance they provide in using lessons from attacks to secure their own systems.To understand how the target may adjust it helps to think of it as a multi-stage process: (1) recognizing a system is not performing as it should, (2) identifying the nature of the malfunction, (3) determining the weaknesses in the target system that allowed the cyberattack, (4) engineering a fix, and (5) promulgating the fix throughout the organization.This, in turn, would suggest why some organizations adjust faster than others. One reason is organizational culture. Does it take cybersecurity seriously? Are its people allowed to find faults and tell the truth about them? Is responsibility for fixing faults clear? Does the organization tell others? Another reason arises from the nature of the attacked systems – can their owners afford to take it down and change it without creating new faults or without having to retrain users? A third reason stems from whether the organization has access to outside vendors of software and cybersecurity – yielding a pronounced advantage for those that do.All this suggests strategies for confounding the target’s adjustment strategy. Choose targets carefully, concentrating on targets that react slowly. Keep up the military pressure in ways that inhibit withdrawing systems for repair. Limit the size and scope of cyberattacks so that the effects are less obvious, hence less likely to be attended to. Exploit a vulnerability that is particular to the target rather than one that is more widespread. Use penetration methods that are difficult to find (perhaps by using entry points that are difficult to trace). Use deception and distraction. Last, persuade third parties to hold off helping.Putting these concepts into practice is not trivial. A first guess on how others may react may come from gauging how one’s own forces would. Modeling a logical decision process – one that reflects known pathologies of potential adversaries – may provide another perspective. Historical analogies may provide an insight or two. In any case, USCYBERCOM needs to develop a body of research and exploration that acknowledges the potential of others to learn. Thus can it figure out how to make them learn slowly, incompletely, or, better yet, incorrectly.

Analysis of Affordance, Time, and Adaptation in the Assessment of Industrial Control System Cybersecurity Risk.

Industrial control systems increasingly use standard communication protocols and are increasingly connected to public networks-creating substantial cybersecurity risks, especially when used in critical infrastructures such as electricity and water distribution systems. Methods of assessing risk in such systems have recognized for some time the way in which the strategies of potential adversaries and risk managers interact in defining the risk to which such systems are exposed. But it is also important to consider the adaptations of the systems' operators and other legitimate users to risk controls, adaptations that often appear to undermine these controls, or shift the risk from one part of a system to another. Unlike the case with adversarial risk analysis, the adaptations of system users are typically orthogonal to the objective of minimizing or maximizing risk in the system. We argue that this need to analyze potential adaptations to risk controls is true for risk problems more generally, and we develop a framework for incorporating such adaptations into an assessment process. The method is based on the principle of affordances, and we show how this can be incorporated in an iterative procedure based on raising the minimum period of risk materialization above some threshold. We apply the method in a case study of a small European utility provider and discuss the observations arising from this.

Instability of belief-free equilibria

Various papers have presented folk theorem results for repeated games with private monitoring that rely on belief-free equilibria. I show that these equilibria are not robust against small perturbations in the behavior of potential opponents. Specifically, I show that essentially none of the belief-free equilibria is evolutionarily stable, and that in generic games none of these equilibria is neutrally stable. Moreover, in a large family of games (which includes many public good games), the belief-free equilibria fail to satisfy even a very mild stability refinement.

Instability of Equilibria with Imperfect Private Monitoring

Various papers have presented folk-theorem results that yield efficiency in the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma with imperfect private monitoring. I present a mild refinement that requires robustness against small perturbations in the behavior of potential opponents, and I show that only defection satisfies this refinement among all the existing equilibria in the literature.

IMAGE TRANSFORMATION OF THE RUSSIAN ARMY: EXPERIENCE AND PROBLEMS

At present, the formation of a positive image of the armed forces of the Russian Federation among various social groups is necessary. Many citizens want to have a full understanding of the army, since this is one of the most important institutions of the state and the country's security directly depends on it. One of the most important components is the image of the armed forces in the youth environment, as in Russia there is a mixed recruitment of troops, and many servicemen carry out their service on conscription. The transformation of the information sphere into a system-forming factor in the life of a society that actively influences its state, development and security is in demand. Therefore, the information security aspect is rather difficult to overestimate. It is very important for our state, in the current conditions of information confrontation, to respond in a timely manner to the information activity of potential adversaries who may try to form a negative image of the Russian army, undermining its fighting capacity, authority, and people's trust. There is an urgent increase in the role of information and communication technologies in politics and the public sphere. In this regard, it becomes possible to more effectively form, introduce and develop the image of the Armed Forces in the minds of citizens. There is a proliferation of conflicting and diverse information about the army, which is often untrue. To change such activities, effective approaches are needed in the production and broadcasting of information on the Armed Forces, the use of various channels of communication to enhance the prestige of military service and trust in it. It is necessary to cover competently and professionally the activities of the Armed Forces in military conflicts. Effective information support of the army's participation in military operations (including media) reduces the potential of potential adversaries to discredit the Armed Forces. And the integral image of the Russian army in the international arena increases its strength in the eyes of the world community, positively influences the export of weapons to military cooperation. The article analyzes the changes in the image of the Russian army at the present stage of its functioning. Building on the achievements of the domestic Political Science in the field of political imageology, the author focuses on the some negative and positive of the factors and trends, creating an image of the Russian Armed Forces. Author give periodization of the transformation of the image the army. Presented strategic vectors to improve it.

Nuclear weapons, the United States and alliances in Europe and Asia: Toward an institutional perspective

ABSTRACTAmerica’s alliances in Europe and East Asia all involve some institutional cooperation on U.S. nuclear weapons policy, planning or employment—from consultative fora in Asia to joint policy and sharing of nuclear warheads in NATO. Such cooperation is often analyzed through the prism of “extended nuclear deterrence,” which focuses on the extension of U.S. security guarantees and their effect on potential adversaries. This article argues that this underplays the importance of institutional factors: Allies have historically addressed a range of objectives through such cooperation, which has helped to catalyze agreements about broader alliance strategy. The varied form such cooperation takes in different alliances also flows from the respective bargaining power of allies and the relative importance of consensus, rather than perceived threats. The article concludes that nuclear weapons cooperation will remain crucial in successful U.S. alliance management, as allies negotiate their relationship with each other in the face of geostrategic change.

Gender in Constitutional Discourses on Abortion

In as far as the regulation of abortion deals with issues like how and to what extent can women’s capacity to gestate and give birth be controlled, and by whom, any discourse on abortion necessarily reflects a construction of women’s citizenship, hence of gender. The question is, which is the ruling construction? Behind non-legal discourses that focus on human life and public power’s duty to protect it, there lies the modern construction of gender that articulates women’s passive citizenship within the state. This is also true of confrontational discourses that construct women and the foetus as potential adversaries. Both discourses are traditional in continental Europe. Yet, they are being superseded by an understanding of abortion from the perspective of women’s active citizenship. Spanish Organic Act 2/2010 stands as part of this trend. Not surprisingly, governmental attempts to reinstate women’s passive citizenship in this matter have met stark resistance.

Conditions for creating perfectly secure systems

The present paper reviews a method for establishing secure information systems by complicating the possibility to research them for potential adversaries. A formalized model of a researcher and a definition of a research secure system are presented. A theorem for conditions required for creating a system perfectly secured from research. The Shannon's theorem of absolute security of perfect secrecy ciphers in cryptography is an instance of the theorem presented in the paper.

Reversal of Fortunes: Transformations in State-NGO Relations in Bangladesh

In 2011, the government of Bangladesh began an investigation into the financial dealings of the Grameen Bank that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. This disciplining of a world-renowned institution and its founder by the state reconfigures the altered relationship between the state and NGOs in Bangladesh. This article investigates this about-face between the state and NGOs from the 1990s, when their relationship was characterized as ‘partners in development’, to the late 2000s when the state saw the leading NGOs and their leaders as potential political adversaries. In Bangladesh, the former relationship of a weak state vis-à-vis the powerful, western-funded NGO has been recalibrated. Under the present condition of authoritarian rule, the state is willing to accept the role of the NGO as a development actor but not as a political contender. This article examines this shifting relationship between the state and NGOs.

Waves of control [guided vehicles

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V ) is almost certain to be needed to make the most of autonomous and semi-autonomous driving. Securing all communication vulnerabilities to hackers is and will continue to be an uphill struggle. Computer security is a cops-and-robbers affair, which never ends, with continual attempts by each side to outsmart the other, said by John Dolan, principal systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Car companies have started to work together to deal with the potential hacking challenge. GM, among others, has joined Auto ISAC: an industry-wide effort to identify emerging threats and potential adversaries.

LEGAL DESCRIPTION VALUE VALUE AS SOCIAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE AT THE VALUABLE RELATION OF THE FUTURE OFFICERS TO THE RIGHT

В статье, на основании анализа различных источников представлена характеристика правовой ценности как ценности социально-организационной. Авторы отмечают, что усложняющиеся социальные процессы в России определенным образом направляют общественное развитие к нарастанию плюрализма мнений и создания ситуаций «потенциальных противоречий». К сожалению, в связи с этим вероятность социальных потрясений внутри нашей страны только возрастает. При этом потенциальные противники России открыто заявляют о своих притязаниях. В данных условиях существенно возрастает общественно-государственная значимость органов обеспечивающих право и его реализующих, их предназначения и социальных функций по силовому и правовому разрешению опасных конфликтов на территории нашей страны, с важнейшей целью – недопущения расползания «кровоточащих ран» внутренних вооруженных конфликтов. Исторический процесс образования государств потребовал такого способа регуляции отношений между частями ставшего неоднородным общества и его целостным бытием, какого не знала социально-однородная родоплеменная община; таким способом и стало законодательное оформление правовых отношений, определявших обязанности и права каждой части общества и обязательных для всех представителей каждого сословия икаждой этнической, половой, возрастной, профессиональной группы. Полученные результаты целесообразно использовать в психолого-педагогической теории и образовательной практике.

Second Acts in Cyberspace

Cyberattacks depend, to a large extent on surprise. Because they do, the efficacy of their attacks may well fall sharply after the outset of an extended campaign – although that is not entirely bad news if some of the adjustments made to minimize future damage are themselves damaging (e.g., not trusting information that was once corrupted). Nevertheless, if cyberwarriors wish to maintain their relevance over the course of some future military campaign they need to understand how adversaries are likely to react to the first wave of cyberattacks. Furthermore, if cyberwarriors are to fulfill their defensive roles, it may help to understand how their own non-cyber colleagues are apt to react, the better to prioritize the assistance they provide in using lessons from attacks to secure their own systems.To understand how the target may adjust it helps to think of it as a multi-stage process: (1) recognizing a system is not performing as it should, (2) identifying the nature of the malfunction, (3) determining the weaknesses in the target system that allowed the cyberattack, (4) engineering a fix, and (5) promulgating the fix throughout the organization.This, in turn, would suggest why some organizations adjust faster than others. One reason is organizational culture. Does it take cybersecurity seriously? Are its people allowed to find faults and tell the truth about them? Is responsibility for fixing faults clear? Does the organization tell others? Another reason arises from the nature of the attacked systems – can their owners afford to take it down and change it without creating new faults or without having to retrain users? A third reason stems from whether the organization has access to outside vendors of software and cybersecurity – yielding a pronounced advantage for those that do.All this suggests strategies for confounding the target’s adjustment strategy. Choose targets carefully, concentrating on targets that react slowly. Keep up the military pressure in ways that inhibit withdrawing systems for repair. Limit the size and scope of cyberattacks so that the effects are less obvious, hence less likely to be attended to. Exploit a vulnerability that is particular to the target rather than one that is more widespread. Use penetration methods that are difficult to find (perhaps by using entry points that are difficult to trace). Use deception and distraction. Last, persuade third parties to hold off helping.Putting these concepts into practice is not trivial. A first guess on how others may react may come from gauging how one’s own forces would. Modeling a logical decision process – one that reflects known pathologies of potential adversaries – may provide another perspective. Historical analogies may provide an insight or two. In any case, USCYBERCOM needs to develop a body of research and exploration that acknowledges the potential of others to learn. Thus can it figure out how to make them learn slowly, incompletely, or, better yet, incorrectly.

Dynamic preference revelation and expression of personal frames: how Weibo is used in an anti-nuclear protest in China

This study explores the use of Weibo in a protest against a nuclear fuel processing plant in China. This study argues that social media play an important role in the development of protests in non-democratic societies through the mechanism of preference revelation, which blurs the boundary between offline protests and the individualized expression of preferences on social media. Of Weibo tweets which were posted prior to the occurrence of the offline protest, 11,788 protest-related were examined with the aid of a supervised machine learning technique. The results showed that the revelation of personal preferences in the form of individualized expressions of opposition were more common than mobilization and coordination, and such preferences were legitimized by the personal frames of risk and the distrust in government. The use of Weibo to mobilize potential opponents to the project, primarily by calling for the expression of opposition, was less frequent than the use of Weibo to express personal frames. Furthermore, the prevalence of Weibo usage changed dramatically. In the first few days of the protest, the revelation of personal preferences and personal frames of risk were prominent, whereas personal frames of distrust in government were common in the days leading to the street protest.