[iwar] Duration of Cyber Conflicts

From: Dan Ellis (ellisd@cs.ucsb.edu)
Date: 2001-07-09 05:08:50


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Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2001 08:08:50 -0400
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Subject: [iwar] Duration of Cyber Conflicts
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	Alright, all, cyber warfare ("informatin warfare" in the last thread)
does connote a prolonged engagement of high intensity.  Is that,
however, what people really expect cyber conflicts to be?  Whenever I
think of cyber warfare, I immediately picture a conflict of high
intensity that lasts hours to days.  (I imagine the recon stage will
take place over a long period of time in a stealthy manner before the
high intensity conflict begins.)  Some may argue that this is not cyber
warfare, but rather an cyber conflict.  I don't visualize trench warfare
as having any analogy in information conflicts.  I visualize cyber
warfare as being more analogous to dropping an atom bomb.  You have a
large amount of off-line preparation (designing/building the bomb,
choosing target) but a relatively short amount of time in engagement
(hours in a plane, open the hatches, fly away).  It takes two short
instances to persuade the adversary to surrender.  The war would have
been much shorter if either side had started throwing atom bombs at each
other earlier (would it still have been considered a war if it lasted
only a few days?--say, one atom bomb per day).
	Is there an (inverse) relationship between the capacity of weapons to
do harm (intensity of conflict) and the duration of conflict?  (I am not
a military guy--just a theory guy. :)  If so, how long before cyber
weapons become sophisticated enough to shorten the length of conflict to
hours/days?  If not, where am I wrong?  I suppose that these questions
are hard to answer due to the asymmetry of the problem: almost all cyber
weapons will be more potent against a technology-dependent nation than a
nation whose GNP is a linear function of the number of goats in the
country.

---------------------------
Dan Ellis, Ph.D. student
MITRE Infosec Eng/Scientist
www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ellisd
(703) 883-5807


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