Potential Adversaries Research Articles

Conflict without an Apparent Cause

A game-theoretic model of repeated interaction between two potential adversaries is analyzed to illustrate how conflict could possibly arise from rational decision-makers endogenously processing information, without any exogenous changes to the fundamentals of the environment. This occurs as a result of a convergence of beliefs about the true state of the world by the two players. During each period, each adversary must decide to either stage an attack or not. Conflict ensues if either player chooses to initiate an attack. Choosing to not stage an attack in a given period reveals information to the player’s rival. Thus, over time, beliefs about the true state of the world converge. Depending upon the true state of the world, we can ultimately have either of the two adversaries initiating an attack (either with or without regret) after an arbitrarily long period of tranquility. When this happens, it is as if conflict has suddenly arisen without any apparent cause or impetus. Alternatively (again, depending upon the true state of the world), we could possibly have beliefs converge to a point where neither adversary wants to initiate conflict.

Guest Editorial Special Issue on Secure Embedded IoT Devices for Resilient Critical Infrastructures

The Internet of Things (IoT) creates new technological opportunities for a wide range of systems, such as industrial control systems, smart power grids, vehicular networks (VNs) and intelligent transportation systems, body area networks and healthcare monitoring and control systems and smart homes. At the same time, IoT also increases the threat surface for potential adversaries targeting critical interconnected systems that may depend on embedded IoT systems, such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. At this point, attackers could take advantage from the incorporation of the paradigm to exploit new security gaps, probably caused by unforeseen interoperability and adaptability problems. Indeed, the deployment of Internet-enabled embedded devices that are distributed over major critical domains may create indirect and nonobvious interconnections with the underlying critical infrastructures (CIs). There is a need to further explore the security issues related to IoT technologies and to assure the resilience of CIs against advanced IoT-enabled attacks. The focus of this special issue is therefore to provide readers with the latest advances in securing the interaction between embedded IoT devices and CIs in order to increase their resilience to advanced IoT-enabled threats.

Secure Transmission via Beamforming Optimization for NOMA Networks

Owing to the eminent performance gain, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been regarded as a promising approach to achieve high throughput and low latency for the next-generation networks. Nevertheless, potential adversaries can still pose a threat to secure transmission in NOMA systems. Hence, in this article, secure transmission schemes based on beamforming optimization are designed to combat both internal and external eavesdropping for downlink multi-input single-output NOMA networks. Using the transmit beamforming design, we first propose two schemes to protect the privacy of a specific NOMA user in the presence of untrusted users. Then, the sum secrecy rate optimization problem is studied to combat the external eavesdropper through optimizing the precoding vectors, when the channel state information (CSI) is available. In addition, two secure beamforming strategies with the help of artificial noise and inter-user interference are proposed without eavesdropping CSI, respectively. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes, and some open issues are discussed as well.

Robust Stochastic Sampled-data-based Output Consensus of Heterogeneous Multi-agent Systems Subject to Random DoS Attack: A Markovian Jumping System Approach

This paper addresses the robust stochastic sampled-data-based output feedback (SSDBOF) consensus controller design for a network of continuous-time heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MASs) in the presence of denial-of-service (DoS) attack. Under the mild assumption that the sampling instant is stochastically triggered and satisfies the Markov property, a homogeneous Markovian jump system (MJS) method is introduced that is capable of modeling the stochastic sampled-data-based control system. Furthermore, the randomly occurring Deny-of-Service (DoS) attack problem is also taken into account due to the existence of potential adversary that tries to block the communication channels. A novel discrete-time stochastic Markovian system model is first introduced that enables us to deal with the stochastic sampling and random DoS attack phenomena in a unified framework. Then by adopting the decoupling scheme, some sufficient conditions are proposed such that all the outputs of the following agents can track the output of the leading agent, and the prescribed H∞ performance level is also guaranteed. In our work, the SSDBOF consensus controller design method is transformed to a feasibility problem subject to the linear matrix inequality (LMI) constraints. The theoretical results are finally applied to solve the position tracking problem of a network of vehicle systems.

Sino-American military relations: from quasi-allies to potential adversaries?

Over the past four decades, the nature of Chinese–American military relations has fluctuated from warm and genuinely cooperative to contentious and fraught with real difficulties. At times, the relationship has been relatively stable, with open dialogue and workable crisis management. This paper provides a brief overview of the evolution of Sino-American military relations starting in the early 1970s, when the two countries came together to face a common threat. It traces the relationship through the bumpy, crisis-ridden 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium and examines its gradual steadying toward stability. The paper discusses some of the major issues that hindered positive interaction between the two militaries, including the Taiwan issue; diverging interests in the South China Sea; military developments and regional force postures; U.S. alliances and accommodation of China into the regional security architecture; competition in emerging strategic capabilities and domains; and more profound geostrategic competition. Converging security interests and potential for cooperation are discussed as well. The analysis concludes with suggestions about how to better reduce misperceptions, prevent and manage crisis, refocus from bilateral competition to multilateral cooperation, and create a security architecture in which the world’s two biggest militaries can work together for global public good.

Revolucionarno nasilje na širšem cerkniškem območju 1942

The article presents the revolutionary violence in the wider Cerknica area in 1942, i.e. in the territory of the former municipalities of Begunje pri Cerknici, Cerknica, Rakek and Sv. Vid. The violence was directed at the real, alleged and potential opponents of the communist revolution. There was a total of 47 victims of revolutionary violence, 39 of which were civilians. The article describes some cases of murder, robbery and arson carried out by the Partisan units.

Optimal realistic attacks in continuous-variable quantum key distribution

Quantum cryptographic protocols are typically analysed by assuming that potential opponents can carry out all physical operations, an assumption which grants capabilities far in excess of present technology. Adjusting this assumption to reflect more realistic capabilities is an attractive prospect, but one that can only be justified with a rigorous, quantitative framework that relates adversarial restrictions to the protocols security and performance. We investigate the effect of limitations on the eavesdropper's (Eve's) ability to make a coherent attack on the security of continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD). We consider a realistic attack, in which the total decoherence induced during the attack is modelled by a Gaussian channel. Based on our decoherence model we propose an optimal hybrid attack, which allows Eve to perform a combination of both coherent and individual attacks simultaneously. We evaluate the asymptotic and composable finite-size security of a heterodyne CV-QKD protocol against such hybrid attacks in terms of Eve's decoherence. We show that when the decoherence is greater than a threshold value, Eve's most effective strategy is reduced to the individual attack. Thus, if we are willing to assume that the decoherence caused by the memory and the collective measurement is large enough, it is sufficient to analyse the security of the protocol only against individual attacks, which significantly improves the CV-QKD performance in terms of both the key rate and the maximum secure transmission distance.

The figure of the child in democratic politics

This article seeks to illuminate the figure of the child in democratic politics by arguing that children play a constitutive role as temporary outsiders who present both renewal and risk to the demos. Using Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, we begin with an ontological account of children as new individuals that are central to renewing democratic freedom and plurality. In the second section, we explore how children can be conceived in terms of political risk by focussing on Arendt’s debate with Ralph Ellison concerning the desegregation of American schools in the 1960s. Their arguments about whether children should appear in politics underscores the constitutive role that child–adult relationships play in debates about the normative fabric of democratic society. Finally, we use the radical democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe to argue that children can be characterised as an excluded group of potential adversaries that appear in political contests over claims to represent the demos. From this perspective, the article reveals that children are central figures in democratic politics because they are constituents of an unknown future polity.

Frameup: An incriminatory attack on Storj: A peer to peer blockchain enabled distributed storage system

In this work we present a primary account of frameup, an incriminatory attack made possible because of existing implementations in distributed peer to peer storage. The frameup attack shows that an adversary has the ability to store unencrypted data on the hard drives of people renting out their hard drive space. This is important to forensic examiners as it opens the door for possibly framing an innocent victim. Our work employs Storj as an example technology, due to its popularity and market size. Storj is a blockchain enabled system that allows people to rent out their hard drive space to other users around the world by employing a cryptocurrency token that is used to pay for the services rendered. It uses blockchain features like a transaction ledger, public/private key encryption, and cryptographic hash functions – but this work is not centered around blockchain. Our work discusses two frameup attacks, a preliminary and an optimized attack, both of which take advantage of Storj's implementation. Results illustrate that Storj allows a potential adversary to store incriminating unencrypted files, or parts of files that are viewable on people's systems when renting out their unused hard drive space. We offer potential solutions to mitigate our discovered attacks, a developed tool to review if a person has been a victim of a frameup attack, and a mechanism for showing that the files were stored on a hard drive without the renter's knowledge. Our hope is that this work will inspire future security and forensics research directions in the exploration of distributed peer to peer storage systems that embrace blockchain and cryptocurrency tokens.

What Politicians Believe About Electoral Accountability

Despite legislators’ incentives to respond to their constituents’ opinions on salient issues, they often take positions at odds with public opinion in their districts. These gaps in dyadic representation can arise because of politicians’ perceptions of which constituents will hold them accountable for their actions in office and of their potential future electoral opponents. Using original survey data from more the 3,000 candidates running for state legislative office in 2014 and 2016, I document American politicians’ beliefs about important factors influencing electoral accountability. To test to whom politicians believe they must be responsive, I survey their perceptions of which citizens are most likely to vote and pay attention to their actions in office. I find asymmetries in politicians’ beliefs about to whom they must be accountable. Politicians perceive the partisan makeup of their districts fairly accurately but overestimate the Republican share of the district’s residents. Candidates from both parties underestimated Democratic turnout in 2014. In a conjoint experiment, candidates from both parties believed that Republicans and citizens with conservative issue positions were more likely to turn out and to pay attention to what they do in office. Republican candidates are also more likely to fear losing in future primary elections than Democrats are. Candidates’ perceptions suggest that they would strategically respond more to conservative constituents, possibly exacerbating asymmetric polarization.

Transformational and Transactional Leadership, Understanding How Leadership Cultivates Democratic Citizenship in Panggungharjo, Bantul, Yogyakarta

Leadership is essential in promoting democratic citizenship, and the village government level is not an exception. Using the experience of Panggungharjo Village, Bantul, this paper tries to understand the roles of leadership in supporting the fulfillment of citizens’ rights being related to the context of the Law 6/2014 on Village. Based on interviews conducted during October-November 2016, this paper found that transactional and transformational leadership approaches, conceptualized by Burns (1978), as Panggungharjo Head Village applies, are influential to the effectiveness of public services and welfare provisions. When used complementary and strategically, the two leadership styles determine the effectiveness of village leadership and reform initiatives. Indeed, there is an issue of power that is crucial to take into account. In comprehending this important aspect, Lukes’s (1976, 2005) concept of power dimensions is helpful. His diagram of power consists of tangible power engineering (First Dimension), a new system of procedures that create barriers for potential political opponents (Second Dimension), and the enactment of new norms (Third Dimension). In Panggungharjo the Village Head’s leadership, approach is widely recognized as one the success stories in Indonesian village governance. Nevertheless, this effective and functioning government has resulted in a leadership practice that has created “beneficiaries” rather than “shaper and maker” citizens (Gaventa 2001, 2002, 2004). This outcome may not optimally underpin active citizenship, since in order to promote democratic citizenship, active citizens are a prerequisite.

Hybrid Warfare and the Legal Domain

ABSTRACTThis short essay aims at shedding some light on the use of lawfare as an emerging domain of full spectrum warfare which can either be used in its own right to achieve its own strategic objectives or as an enabler within the context of influencing the adversary in connection with well-planned Info-Ops and Stratcom operations. The authors conclude that considering the law as a domain, the use of lawfare is an “Offset Strategy,” which will provide a considerable competitive advantage in the proper offensive and defensive applicability of law which will prevent potential adversaries to abuse the rule of law to achieve their own strategic objectives.

Russia’s Naval Development — Grand Ambitions and Tactical Pragmatism

ABSTRACTIncreased activity and more aggressive behavior at sea have revitalized interest in the Russian Navy. Moscow communicates grand naval ambitions through official doctrines, while in reality the Navy is being developed as a predominantly coastal defense force. In the light of a troubled Russian economy, this raises the question of whether the Russian Navy is in fact increasing in strength, as the official rhetoric suggests, or rather is a declining force. This article examines how current geopolitical and economic factors influence Russian naval development. It argues that despite an inevitable decline in inventory, the Russian Navy is adapting pragmatically to the strategic and geopolitical circumstances and should be recognized as a capable potential adversary in the years to come.

Ядерное сдерживание: концепции и риски

Among the existing forms of exchange of massive nuclear strikes between strategic nuclear forces of Russia and the United States (first disarming, launch-on-warning, and retaliation strikes), launch-on-warning is the one that poses the biggest risk. The decision to carry out this type of strike can be made within a few minutes based on data from an early warning system. Since there is no way to completely rule out the possibility of errors in generation of that data, the main focus in the concept of nuclear deterrence should be made on the retaliation strike. This strike posture has always been used as a rationale for the composition of Strategic Rocket Force and Navy forces which focus on ensuring that weapons can survive a disarmament first strike from a potential adversary. This would allow more time for decision-making regarding the use of nuclear forces; therefore, due to the increased vulnerability of informational systems, the principles of a retaliation strike should be given more attention in planning operations involving strategic nuclear forces. Early warning systems should be used first and foremost for the global monitoring of missile and carrier rocket launches, i.e. monitoring accidental (unintended) and provocative missile launches, as well as for assessing nations’ compliance with the Missile Technology Control Regime.

Why Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage Regarding Foreign Trade Doesn’t Work in Today’s Global Economy: Labor Arbitrage, Disloyal Capital, WTO Violations and National Security Implications

The theoretical basis for international trade is Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage. Paul Samuelson, one of the leading lights in the economics profession in the 20th century, referred to it as one of the most beautiful ideas in economics. Yet, no one seems to have considered its validity in the context of the current global trade environment. What free-trade advocates have not done is to look at the bases underlying Ricardo’s theory, namely, that capital is loyal to the country of origin and that the value of currencies is responsive to imbalances in trade. This article demonstrates that capital is not loyal to the country of origin and that currencies do not move to smooth out imbalances in trade. This then forces us to look at the political, economic, and national security aspects of global trade, rather than just repeating the mantra that free trade benefits all. Clearly, there are winners and losers and, thus far, American workers have been the losers. The last election demonstrates that exporting jobs to countries such as China has domestic political consequences when people believe that the system is not working for them. The article then asserts we need an industrial policy for this country that seeks to benefit not just shareholders but also workers, and which recognizes the national security implications of global trade and the danger of supply chains that run through a potential adversary.

Sino-US Trade War: Conservative Trade Policy in the Grand Economic Strategy of the United States

The Sino–United States (US) trade war since 2017 has triggered Sino–US confrontations in the economic field and also intensified geopolitical competition. From a historical perspective, the current Sino–US trade war is a continuation of the conservative US trade policy, rather than a dramatic development. From a global perspective, the trade dispute between China and the United States is only part of President Donald Trump's grand global economic strategy that aims to stabilize the economic hegemony of the United States. Trump's economic diplomacy targets both China and its Western allies, with the goal of achieving a comprehensive and complete solution. The developmental status of the United States shows that its economic strength is increasingly insufficient to support the status of global hegemony, as well as being increasingly incapable of meeting the global requirements for providing public goods. Therefore, trade wars are essentially trade policy adjustments made by the United States to consolidate its hegemonic foundations and fight against potential opponents, e.g., the trade wars against Germany in the 1960s and Japan in the 1980s. Based on the timeline of the current trade war, Trump was obviously well prepared. Trump's behavior now clearly violates the basic rules of WTO and his policy does not focus on technology and innovation, which is key to future economic growth. Whether Trump's well-planned and aggressive economic strategy will work, it will fundamentally change China's US policy from cooperative to more independent.

Preserving Location Privacy in Spatial Crowdsourcing Under Quality Control

Emerging spatial crowdsourcing (SC) provides an approach for collecting and analyzing spatiotemporal information from intelligent transportation systems. However, the exposure of massive location privacy to potential adversaries for the purpose of quality control makes workers more vulnerable. To protect workers' location privacy, an obfuscation scheme is proposed to incorporate uncertainties into the SC quality control problem through obfuscating the standard location data in terms of both space and time. Two measures, location entropy and results accuracy, are used to evaluate the performance of location privacy protection. We theoretically and experimentally confirm the security and accuracy of the obfuscation approach. The results of experiments show that: a) hiding workers' location from the requester reduces the quality of SC; and b) obfuscation arithmetic with appropriate obfuscation coefficients protects workers' location privacy with little effect on SC quality. Under the protection of this obfuscation scheme, the new system provides better security and similar quality compared to the existing SC system.

Faces are Protected as Privacy: An Automatic Tagging Framework Against Unpermitted Photo Sharing in Social Media

On social platforms like Facebook, it is popular and pleasurable to share photos among friends, but it also puts other participants in the same picture in jeopardy when the photos are released online without the permission from them. To solve this problem, recently, the researchers have designed some fine-grained access control mechanisms for photos shared on the social platform. The uploader will tag each participant in the photo, then they will receive internal messages and configure their own privacy control strategies. These methods protect their privacy in photos by blurring out the faces of participants. However, there is still some defect in these strategies due to the unpredictable tagging behaviors of the uploader. Malicious users can easily manipulate unauthorized tagging processes and then publish the photos, which the participants want them to be confidential in social media. To address this critical problem, we propose a participant-free tagging system for photos on social platforms. This system excludes potential adversaries through automatic tagging processes over two cascading stages: 1) an initialization stage will be applied to every new user to collect his/her own portrait samples for future internal searching and tagging, and; 2) the remaining unidentified participants will be tagged in cooperative tagging stage by the users who have been identified in the first stage. For the system evaluation of efficiency and effectiveness, we conducted a series of experiments. The results demonstrated the tagging efficiency (96% tagging rate and 0.77s/photo tagging speed on average), photo masking and unmasking efficiency (0.13s/face on average), and the privacy preserving performance (over 90% identities in both group and individual photo are preserved).

Understanding Putin's Nuclear "Superweapons"

Peculiar as they may appear to Westerners, the novel nuclear delivery systems announced by Vladimir Putin on March 1, 2018 complement Russia's overall nuclear strategy. These weapons can be divided into two groups that serve different purposes. The novel "assured retaliation" weapons such as the Poseidon intercontinental nuclear-powered torpedo and the Burevestnik nuclear-powered ground-launched cruise missiles appear to be a component of a dissuasion strategy aiming to convince US decisionmakers to forgo strategic missile defenses. Russian leaders may believe that the extreme nature of these systems signals their resolve and determination to neutralize any possible threat to their retaliatory capability posed by future advances in counterforce targeting and missile defenses. The theater-range hypersonic missiles such as Kinzhal and Tsirkon, by contrast, serve a more quotidian purpose: increasing the complexity of integrated air and missile defense for potential adversaries. Armed with conventional warheads, these weapons can help attain practical military objectives in subnuclear conflict.

Attack versus defense: A strategic rationale for role differentiation in conflict.

Is there a strategic mechanism that explains role-contingent differences in conflict behavior? I sketch a theory in which differences in optimal behavior for attackers and defenders arise under initially symmetric conditions through the dynamic accumulation of differences in the distributions of traits in the subpopulations of potential opponents.