Today's Security Research Articles

India’s Bilateral Security Relationship in South Asia

The article argues that the contours of a security architecture are becoming slowly visible in South Asia. This process is nurtured by two developments. First, since the 2000s, India has increased its security cooperation with nearly all its neighbours in South Asia. Second, since 2013 governments in New Delhi have promoted the concept of India as a security provider in the region and the Indian Ocean. The process towards closer security cooperation also indicates that threat perceptions among most South Asian countries vis-à-vis non-state actors have converged, so that security today is sought by cooperation rather than by confrontation.

When conquest would have paid: domestic mobilization and political constraints in the Thai-Cambodian border conflict 2008–2011

ABSTRACTIn recent decades, a lack of state capacity has been seen as a major threat to international security. This article disagrees by making a simple claim: states that lack the capacity to go to war compromise to avoid it. I develop the argument using insights from the discipline of International Relations and military studies and probe its plausibility with a single case study, the Thai-Cambodian border conflict during 2008–2011. Based on data from field research in the two countries, I use Peter Liberman's framework to argue that this is a case when conquest would have paid for Thailand. Yet, a lack of domestic capacity created trade-offs, fear of instability and reduced confidence in a military strategy, which together explain why large-scale armed conflict was avoided by both sides. The findings have potential implications for how we think about international security today.

Pumps for the Action on the European Union in the Scope of the European Agenda on Security

The European Union aims to ensure that people live in an area of freedom, security and justice, without internal boundaries. Europeans need to feel confident that, wherever they move within Europe, their freedom and their security are well protected, in full compliance with the Union's values, including the rule of law and fundamental rights. In recent years new and complex threats have emerged highlighting the need for further synergies and closer cooperation at all levels. Many of today's security concerns originate from instability in the EU's immediate neighbourhood and changing forms of radicalisation, violence and terrorism. Threats are becoming more variable and more international, as well as increasingly cross-border and cross-sectorial in nature. These threats require an effective and coordinated response at European level. All the EU institutions have agreed that we need a renewed Internal Security Strategy for the coming five years.

러시아의 사이버안보 전략

The Russian strategy on the cyber security today is characterized by its counterbalance against the US-centered Western order. However, there also has been limited version of cooperations as well. Russiaʹs fundamental goal in the process of these confrontations and cooperations is ʹto establish a global cyber security governanceʹ that reflects Russiaʹs national interests. Therefore, whether the cyber space would become a competitive arena of zero-sum games or a cooperative space with a win‐win situation, would be an important issue of the unconventional security studies in the future.BR There are three main characteristics of Russiaʹs strategy on the cyber security. First, it reflects Russiaʹs original perception on the ʹcyber space,ʹ which is different from that of the West. Unlike the Western world which emphasizes the free flow of information, Russia places a considerable emphasis on regulating the cyber space as a national territory under the sovereign jurisdiction. Second, Russia regards the competence in the cyber space as a means to enhance its national interests in the digital age. This view also illustrates the Russiaʹs perception that its cyber space is constantly exposed to the external attacks, which will inflict an enormous impact on the country. To support this approach, the Russian government has been actively establishing relevant legislative procedures. Third, the governmental department in charge of the cyber security in Russia is being switched from the intelligence organizations to the military. This shows Russiaʹs intention to step up its strategy from passively analyzing the given threats to aggressively expanding its cyber capabilities. It also implies that both the conventional warfare and cyber war can occur simultaneously.BR The Russian strategy has a number of points that can induce conflicts with the West. For this reason, although Russia has successfully strengthened its cooperation with China, it failed to improve its relations with the US, fixating the image as a leading country of the anti‐Western camp. Once there had been limited cooperation between Russia and the US on the realm of security, establishing ‘hot line’ for cyber security. But the cooperative phase was soon turned into the continued confrontational phase as the Crimean and Ukrainian issues have exacerbated the bilateral relations. It is highly likely that Russia will promote the global internet governance which emphasizes ʹthe elements of sovereignty,ʹ in opposition against the Western perception which highlights the free flow of information. In other words, Russia is expected to pursue a strategy to mitigate the elements of threats in the cyber space between the countries, while forming a multilateral stage where the sovereignty of each country is respected in order to utilize it as a means to raise its voice on the matter.

KATAYAMA Yoshio, Terrorism and Security Today: Counter-terrorism and Democracy

KATAYAMA Yoshio, <i>Terrorism and Security Today: Counter-terrorism and Democracy</i>

Principles of maintenance of the informational security of Ukraine

The article analyzes the principles of information security as a component of national security of Ukraine. Аuthor substantiates that effective planning, organization and management of information security today can not be achieved if not identified appropriate scientific principles. In this connection one of the important aspects of this problem is the necessity to define the basic scientific principles on which it is advisable to develop information security of Ukraine. It is noted that detection of capabilities and ways of solving the providing of information security should be preceded by an analysis of existing in legal science of principles of organization and management of information science. During his research author adhered the generalized definition of information security as such a state of society that naturally occurs where information security is the main guarantor of all resources and social transformations: the introduction of truly humanistic relations, socioeconomic development and protection of national interests. Consideration of information security was done on the methodological basis from the perspective of each functional orientation principle. Materials of analysis also provide an opportunity to assess a number of common mistakes in forming a system of principles, and in forming of separate principles. The article noted, firstly, that the authors of most systems of principles do not provide them, unfortunately, features of the system. In addition, violated the requirement of accordance of these principles together a specific aim of functioning of the system, part of which can be introduced simultaneously some methodological, administrative, legal and other principles. Justification of certain system of principles of information security means the increase of methodological adequacy of organizational information security of socio-economic condition of the state. Based on the strong methodological basis, informational security of the state begins to function as a systemic formation. Other words the basis for the definition and implementation of the basic principles of management should be laid their a conceptual complementarity, aimed at achieving a balance of functional, theoretical, methodological approaches and means to ensure the effectiveness of real current system of information policy.

On the Security of Machine Learning in Malware C&amp;C Detection

One of the main challenges in security today is defending against malware attacks. As trends and anecdotal evidence show, preventing these attacks, regardless of their indiscriminate or targeted nature, has proven difficult: intrusions happen and devices get compromised, even at security-conscious organizations. As a consequence, an alternative line of work has focused on detecting and disrupting the individual steps that follow an initial compromise and are essential for the successful progression of the attack. In particular, several approaches and techniques have been proposed to identify the command and control (C8C) channel that a compromised system establishes to communicate with its controller. A major oversight of many of these detection techniques is the design’s resilience to evasion attempts by the well-motivated attacker. C8C detection techniques make widespread use of a machine learning (ML) component. Therefore, to analyze the evasion resilience of these detection techniques, we first systematize works in the field of C8C detection and then, using existing models from the literature, go on to systematize attacks against the ML components used in these approaches.

Strategic Uncertainty, the Third Offset, and the US Grand Strategy

ABSTRACT: This article demonstrates the usefulness of rethinking our understanding of uncertainty and how that might affect the course of the Department of Defense's Third Offset Strategy and US grand strategy in general. In the foreword to the 2015 national military strategy, General Martin E. Dempsey, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unequivocally states: Today's global security environment is the most unpredictable I have seen in 40 years of service. (1) This bold statement fits the narrative of strategic discourse in Washington, DC, and other Western capitals during the past 25 years: today's international system is dominated by high uncertainty and unpredictability. (2) Despite the lip service paid to uncertainty, the Washington policy community and many academic experts have a narrow understanding of the concept. Emily Goldman describes the most common view of uncertainty in the strategic studies community well: is present when the likelihood of future events is indefinite or incalculable. (3) But is this simple definition of uncertainty really useful for guiding foreign policy strategic planning in today's highly unpredictable global environment? This article presents a more nuanced way of defining uncertainty and shows how separating different levels of uncertainty leads to more effective strategic planning. The world of business strategy consulting offers a more sophisticated understanding of uncertainty than foreign policy and national security scholarship. Borrowing from this management literature, a middle way that avoids the two extreme views dominating national security scholarship on this topic materializes. As the next paragraphs show, foreign policy experts either regard the international security environment as inscrutable and unpredictable as Chairman Dempsey does, or they believe it is much more predictable and benign than the US national security community claims. Conceptualizing different levels of uncertainty, however, offers a more useful way to plan strategically for a range of foreign policy challenges, as detailed in the second section of the article. The article defines four levels of uncertainty, along with the recommended strategy tools associated with each one of them, and then applies these new concepts to a few examples of uncertainty encountered in national security planning. To demonstrate how this framework provides the US government with a useful perspective, the article uses examples of policy and strategic uncertainties from the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds report, and discusses them through the prism of the four levels of uncertainty. (4) The Global Trends report, the most comprehensive and sophisticated effort of the US government to analyze long-term strategic uncertainty, showcases how some business ideas on uncertainty can improve planning for unknowns in the national security arena. The article applies this framework to the contentious debates on the Department of Defense's Third Offset Strategy and to the debates on America's grand strategic course. Before proceeding to this analysis, the article sketches the contours of the strategic studies community's current debate on uncertainty. Cult of Complexity: The Binary View of Uncertainty How do national security experts and academic students of international relations think of uncertainty? Broadly speaking, the academic and policy debates on uncertainty in the international system reveal two schools of thought, one of inscrutable uncertainty and complexity and one of overhyped threats. Most scholars and practitioners in the national security bureaucracy rely on the distinction that risks can be estimated using probabilities, while uncertainty cannot. (5) Since today's security environment is seen as increasingly complex and uncertain, it is also considered increasingly less predictable and more dangerous. …

Mobile Deployable Laboratory – Chemical Module

Abstract Changes in the layout of today's security medium, in which NATO and its member states evolve, in accordance to the new types of risks and threats, caused the reconsideration of the concept of security and modified priorities regarding civilian protection, territory and combatant forces. The amplitude of the specific phenomenon associated with the proliferation of mass destruction weapons put the highest level of international political and military decisions into debate. In the given conditions, the field of CBRN defense becomes a strategic priority for the Alliance which decided (through the declaration of the general secretary of NATO at the summit in Prague) to adopt a set of engagements regarding the improvement of the defense capabilities against new threats through modernization and adaptation of specific structures. This paper presents the results of research conducted in the field of CBRN defense regarding the introduction of a “DEPLOYABLE Mobile CBRN Laboratory” within specific structures, product that will have the capability to be easily deployed in a combat theater, detect and identify (automatically or through instrumental analysis) CBRN agents within a real or suspect CBRN contaminated medium and provide Intel that will help in real time decision processes that can evaluate the consequences of a CBRN event.

Using biometrics to understand your business's risk profile

Today's security landscape is complex. The cost to organisations of cyber fraud and hacking continues to rise, while customers and citizens alike are losing faith in organisations' ability to keep their transactions secure. Recent research from Cisco revealed that only 54% felt confident that companies had the right measures in place, while 41% of security professionals are more concerned with security compared to three years ago 1 . Hackers are becoming more sophisticated in their ability to steal data, transfer funds or cause targeted damage, while digital identity and security are now key issues for organisations and consumers worldwide. So with even the most complex passwords alone no longer seen as sufficient, biometrics technology is increasingly being adopted across a variety of sectors.

Iris Image Enhancement for the Recognition of Non-ideal Iris Images

Iris recognition for biometric personnel identification has gained much interest owing to the increasing concern with security today. The image quality plays a major role in the performance of iris recognition systems. When capturing an iris image under uncontrolled conditions and dealing with non-cooperative people, the chance of getting non-ideal images is very high owing to poor focus, off-angle, noise, motion blur, occlusion of eyelashes and eyelids, and wearing glasses. In order to improve the accuracy of iris recognition while dealing with non-ideal iris images, we propose a novel algorithm that improves the quality of degraded iris images. First, the iris image is localized properly to obtain accurate iris boundary detection, and then the iris image is normalized to obtain a fixed size. Second, the valid region (iris region) is extracted from the segmented iris image to obtain only the iris region. Third, to get a well-distributed texture image, bilinear interpolation is used on the segmented valid iris gray image. Using contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) enhances the low contrast of the resulting interpolated image. The results of CLAHE are further improved by stretching the maximum and minimum values to 0–255 by using histogram-stretching technique. The gray texture information is extracted by 1D Gabor filters while the Hamming distance technique is chosen as a metric for recognition. The NICE-II training dataset taken from UBRIS.v2 was used for the experiment. Results of the proposed method outperformed other methods in terms of equal error rate (EER).

Attempts to theoretically define the concept of energy security as a factor in the determination of the international political and security system

At the beginning of the 21st century, a matter of achieving the energy security, as an essentially important element of the global security system, has become one of the priorities of global politics. This has caused it to become more topical and increased its importance in international relations. The possession of energy reserves provides nations with a number of comparative advantages in contemporary international politics, and with a place among the leading centers of power on a planetary level. This fact gives a special meaning to energy security, because energy resources are an important lever by which nations project their power and influence. The correlation between energy resources and the strengthening of positions and roles of nations in international politics is undeniable and easily verifiable. The paper analyzes and partly explains various attempts to theoretically define the concept of energy security in the context of its growing importance in international relations and the impact on the strengthening of the projected positions of nations as subjects of international order. Nominal definition of the concept of “energy security” has been made more difficult by the fact that there is no universally acceptable definition of the concept of “security”, as well as that there coexist various theoretical approaches to its definition. In the scientific and technical literature, the prevalent concept is that the content and scope of the concept of security today have been substantially expanded due to the continued widening of the limits of its problem framework. The basic characteristics of most of these definitions are non-equivalence – disproportionality and inadequacy. Namely, they are either too narrow and do not include all the contents and essential factors of the security, or they are too wide, and the concept is lost in the range of phenomena. Therefore, in the conceptual sense this term is so debatable that it is not even closely possible to reach an agreement on its meaning. The attempt to define the syntagm of “energy security” reveals the same tendencies as in determining the meaning of the term “security”. Namely, there is a proliferation of different theoretical approaches, as well as differences in the definition of this syntagm, which are substantially determined by, among other things, the status that individual nations have in the global energy system.

Environmental competence as a factor of the quality of environmental education and environmental safety in the system of the principles and strategies of sustainable development

The article discussed the importance of the search and study of the methods of restructuring environmental awareness, and the development of new priorities of the interaction between society and the environment as a fundamentally different way of civilization. Basic characteristics of environmental education as one of the major social aspects of environmental security today are presented. The content and an assessment of environmental competence as an important indicator of educational achievement are determined. An educational model of ecological competence of students in the system of sustainable development is proposed.

Strategy in a Complex World

Although it is commonplace to describe today's security environment as ‘complex’, there are still pockets of coherence around which policy-makers can anchor their strategy. Jamie Gaskarth argues that attempts to mirror the supposedly disorderly global security world with a disorderly strategy have led only to confusion, inefficiency and declining public support. Instead, the government needs to grapple with British identity and link this to a coherent narrative about how and why it wants to act in the future.

Fearless cloud security for media: Why people can trust in the public service model

With file-based workflows now standard across the media industry, using cloud technology to implement network-based workflows is an accelerating trend. Storing media as files enables a whole new class of cloud solutions for media, from media transfer to asset management. Public cloud technologies, in particular, have eliminated the need for speculative up-front capital investments and enabled rapid response to changes in demand, making media businesses that embrace public cloud more agile than ever before. In spite of these obvious advantages, concerns still exist around security of the public cloud. This paper gives an introduction to cloud service and cloud deployment models, addresses the concerns over public cloud security and explains the perspective that is needed on security today.

Review the top 7 things you need to know right now about campus security

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS — With the increased scrutiny on sexual violence in higher education, more students and parents are regarding campus safety as one of the major factors in choosing a college. You will need to stay up‐to‐date on the trends and concerns facing campus security today to keep your enrollment and retention numbers high.

Angell and Mahan: Technology, Globalization, and International Security Today

Norman Angell and Alfred Thayer Mahan were two of the leading thinkers on pre–World War I “interdependence,” offering competing lessons on the changes in technology, economics, and security. At different times during the twentieth century, each one’s ideas seemed to best explain global politics and strategy. This essay reconsiders their ideas in the current era of globalization and global threats.

Mobile vulnerabilities are opening the door to cyber-attacks on corporates

Poorly secured apps represent one of the biggest threats to corporate security today, according to research by IBM and the Ponemon Institute.

Research and Science Today Supplement 1/2014

In this supplement of Research and Science Today journal are included scientific articles which debate problems from social science fields, engineering sciences fields, legal sciences and medical sciences fields: Craiova hospitals, Wallachia, Moldova, diplomatic byzantin ceremonial, eurozone, human security, democratization, globalization, sociological research, appendicular peritonitis, hyperbilirubinemia, pleuro-pulmonary, tuberculosis surgery.hypothyroidism, epilepsy.Research and Science Today Journal is a publication founded in 2011 and it is dedicated to the students of all levels (license, master and doctoral) of faculties in the country and abroad. We want to offer the participants the opportunity to present their scientific works in the following areas: Social Sciences, Economic Sciences, Legal Sciences, Humanities, Education Sciences, Engineering, Medicine and Sport.This journal provides students the opportunity to create and/or to improve their abilities to write scientific papers. So each appearance (two appearances per year at which we can add supplements) contains a number of papers written by students, masters and doctoral from the faculties from the country or/and abroad. The journal promotes original studies contributing to the progress of knowledge and it is motivated by the need to address issues of theory and practice in the areas mentioned above.The Journal is a training means of the factors involved in the conceptualization, development, implementation and evaluation, aiming the formation of creative personalities who could be able to adapt through the changing conditions of life.Journal wants to be a forum for debates disciplinaries and interdisciplinaries theoretical topics, to become a research support, to leverage this work at regional, national and international levels. We believe that this gathering will enjoy the support from both parts of the researchers and of the practitioners, and will provide appropriate training sources held professional through the current problems.

Ford first? Corporate security and the US Department of War's Plant Protection Service's interior organization unit 1917–1918

The Ford Motor Company's corporate security unit is widely considered to be the prototype of in-house corporate security. Drawing on archival research, we demonstrate that beginning in 1917 and continuing through the early 1920s the US Department of War's Plant Protection Service and their interior organization units represent an early example of corporate security emanating from the public sector. The existence and character of this unit challenges the notion that Ford pioneered corporate security and the surveillance, secrecy, employee control, and pre-emptive techniques it typifies. The work of interior organization unit personnel exhibits strategies and features associated with today's professional corporate security managers. We then reflect on the implications of these findings for understanding the history of labor suppression and the origins of corporate security in the United States.