The Science of Cyberspace – Laying the Foundation Download this report in PDF.
Working drafts prepared and edited by Carl W. Hunt and Craig Harm, in support of the Director of the Rapid Fielding Office, Office of the Director, Defense Research and Engineering[1]
Last Updated 31 October 2010
NOTE: This White Paper is provided under the DoD-DHS sponsored project entitled Scientific Enhancements to Networked Domains and Secure Social Spaces (SENDS). One of the key objectives of the SENDS Project[2] is to prototype and test concepts for a “Center of Excellence” for Cyberspace Science, or simply a Center for Cyberspace Science. This White Paper begins a discussion of some of the key scientific concepts that will be important for the establishment and prototyping of the new Center and the work that will be done throughout its participation in the emerging community of Cyberspace Science and Cyberspace Security Science. The charter for the Center for Cyberspace Science will be rooted in the work that takes place in developing the concepts described within this paper. For more information about SENDS, please contact the editors as noted below.
Executive Summary:
The focus on technological solutions to the defense and exploitation of cyberspace, while important, has distracted thinking about the broader issues of this remarkable interconnecting environment. We have allowed technology to serve as a substitute for science in the cyberspace realm and have focused almost exclusively on technical solutions to defend an environment that we are only now beginning to understand. This paper proposes that we refocus at least some of our best thinking towards better understanding cyberspace holistically as an interconnecting domain with the potential to bring people closer rather than distancing them and that we consider cyberspace as a medium that enables exploration as much as exploitation. We look to two organizing constructs to help guide our exploration: the process of exchange and the outcome of emergence. These two related ideas are described below and serve to frame the important questions we must ask to better understand cyberspace and fulfill the basic criteria of science: explain and predict.[3] Using the process of exchange and the outcome of emergence as the lenses through which we search for understanding can guide us to a better comprehension of this remarkable environment that offers to connect people to each other and to the world around them in ways no previously explored environment has been able to do in our history. This paper is about starting down the path of defining and developing the Science of Cyberspace and all that it touches, attempting to bring to this endeavor the rigor of epistemological examination. Also in this undertaking, we hope to ensure a practical approach that results in enhancing the study and application of cyberspace security, a cause that has risen to the level of national security. We seek the outcome of a coevolution of a Science of Cyberspace and a Science of Cyberspace Security in the expectation that the synergy of the two improves each other.
The Science of Cyberspace – Laying the Foundation
Preface: The Environments of Life
Air, water, land and space: these are all physical environments that have dominated our thinking about life since we were first capable of connecting and communicating with each other about the world around us. We fashioned philosophies and beliefs about culture, trade, war and peace around these settings that support life and our quest for exploration and exploitation of the worlds in which we live. These are all environments that existed before us. We slowly grew into them, exploring at a pace that for the most part kept up with the sciences we discovered, refined and tested to explain and predict more about the surroundings in which we formed communities and interacted. A deliberate and relatively cautious discovery process accompanied by both real and perceived boundaries helped us ease into the breakthroughs that led to modern perceptions, thinking and explanations about our physical and social worlds.
Along the way, humans occasionally damaged the physical world in which we live. As we discovered the frailties of these physical surroundings, we began to search for tools and policies to mitigate the damages we did and in some cases succeeded in reducing the harm that potentially affected all forms of life on earth. We also sought ways to increase resilience of individual, organizational and cultural contributions through better respect for the settings that nurture us. Science generally enabled these discoveries and when refined through better technology and policy, science gave us deeper insight to perpetuate living systems in this world through protection of these environments. As humanity matured, it discovered ways to “give back” to these nurturing environments and to employ means to protect them better, through symbiotic relationships.
Cyberspace, a new and now equally influential environment as air, water, land and space, began to emerge in its currently recognizable state as the 20th century transitioned to the 21st century. Rapidly becoming just as significant to our lives and societies as the physical environments, cyberspace is different in important ways as we address in this paper. Unique from the naturally occurring physical environments, we usually, perhaps vainly, claim that cyberspace was created by man, particularly as we continue to finds ways to expand its boundaries in perhaps limitless directions. The expansion at this point seems constrained only by human imagination.[4]
In this way, cyberspace is clearly distinguished from air, water, land and space – we may push the envelope of these environments, but the physical nature of these worlds tend to push back. For all practical purposes, when man pushes the environment of cyberspace, it appears to be man who pushes back through human nature’s resistance to change. In fact, cyberspace seems on the verge of demonstrating that man’s nature may be just as unyielding as the finite characteristics of physical nature.
It’s unclear yet how constraints of social and physical “laws of science” actually apply in cyberspace because we have so few scientific principles and corresponding disciplines to describe the environment that becomes more commonplace in our lives daily. We must borrow from the ongoing work of other disciplines such as physics, biology, mathematics, network science, social science and media ecology to begin our explanations. Fortunately, these disciplines are manifest in cyberspace as well.[5]
It seems clear however, that a deeper understanding of cyberspace will require multiple, perhaps new scientific disciplines working in synergy with each other and with emerging technologies and concepts that will all coevolve together. The same multidisciplinary approach helped us better discover the means to exploit and protect the physical environments that sustain life and offer rich insights into how life may unfold through the advent of cyberspace.
Protection of environments critical for life requires attention and much of the discussion of this science must bear that in mind. Consider that America has since its founding overcome the challenges of defining environments while simultaneously protecting them. Securing freedom for the evolution of economic and sociocultural opportunity has always been a challenge America has been willing to undertake on behalf of its citizens and its allies. In fact, overcoming these challenges may even be a major component of what defines America, perhaps more so at the dawn of this new age of massive and connected collectivity.
Today’s cyberspace, whether manmade or not, was largely discovered or invented within the United States and is at the beginning of a time in which we can further test the synergies that arose from the settings established at the founding of this nation. The important concepts that will guide the US through a period of both short- and long-term leadership in understanding and exploiting cyberspace are unfolding around us much as they did during our origins as a nation, even in the face of threats to cyberspace. Government, business and academic leaders are emerging who recognize and accommodate the opportunities that cyberspace offers. This level of leadership reflects in some measure the manner in which the Founding Fathers set the basis for the great democratic experiment over 230 years ago while simultaneously defending those concepts even through periods of war.
Today, we engage in cyberspace conflict while facing the similar challenge of simultaneously defining this critical environment. America has been here before and overcame these challenges through objectively supported scientific analysis, discovery, experimentation and invention. Recent advances in the social sciences reveal even more about the convergences of people, politics and technology, enabled in new ways by cyberspace. In this age of distraction shaped by the latest gadgets and “fascinating” technologies however, science must reassert its leadership role as we seek to resolve the challenges America and the rest of the world face in the evolution of cyberspace. Technology has always supported the success of this nation, but technology has best succeeded through partnership with science which has helped to temper its influence. That is the legacy of this nation, and why America is uniquely suited to provide leadership in defining cyberspace and the science that must accompany it in order to exploit this environment to the fullest.
In spite of the forgoing emphasis on America’s leadership role in inventing/discovering cyberspace, no existing science apart from political science recognizes nation-state boundaries. While the U.S. may be a leader in defining and using cyberspace, the Science of Cyberspace will be nation-state independent, and perhaps the function of government in defining this new science will be in a support role rather than a leadership role.
In fact, the application of science to the domain of cyberspace offers great opportunities for international cooperation in better understanding the global nature of the new environment and its protection. The cyberspace environment can be a bridge between the physical and technology environments that we have interacted within and the conceptual environments that provide us understanding, meaning, and structure to our individual and collective thoughts.[6]
If cyberspace is explored and exploited by people of all nationalities, it must also be secured and protected in the same fashion. Cyberspace offers the opportunity for all people everywhere to marshal the best of human imagination and creativity to come together to protect it, much as do the other environments. We all breathe the same air, till the same ground and benefit from the same ultimate sources of water – the same principles apply to the exploration, preservation and security of cyberspace.
1. Why a Science of Cyberspace?
The major goal of this paper is to introduce a rationale to create and formalize a Science of Cyberspace. This paper is the first step towards moving from a simple white paper, proposing basic concepts and definitions, to a fuller and richer Manifesto for the Science of Cyberspace. A manifesto is essentially a public declaration of the intent and agenda to accomplish some goal, so we move towards this objective through this White Paper.
All of the important environments in which we as humans thrive, including air, water, land, and space, have supporting scientific principles and corresponding disciplines that help us better understand, explore and exploit these environments for the furtherance of human and other living systems’ prosperity. When we use the term “exploit” we simply mean the use the environment of cyberspace to maximum advantage in ways that ensure open access and consequent fair and reasonable levels of prosperity for all who reside within it.
Below, we generally discuss some basic thoughts on science, cyberspace, a science of cyberspace and even a science of cyberspace security in order to baseline the synergistic nature of this study. Such a baseline, while debatable in composition and definition, provides a framework for contributing to the general body of science in this important new environment.
As cyberspace continues to expand as an integral element of modern society, many today make the case that cyberspace has become a critical environmental factor for the preservation of all living systems to include human cultures and societies. This linkage makes it all the more important to investigate the natural and behavioral phenomena occurring in cyberspace through observation, theoretical explanation, and experimentation. The time has come to articulate what a science of cyberspace would look like and how it might unfold to promote the next phases of human life. Simply, we require a Science of Cyberspace.
It’s all too tempting to define cyberspace in the framework of a battlefield when it’s thought of in the perspectives of military and government contexts.[7] After all, a good portion of the original research that created internetwork protocols and technologies was pioneered by the US Defense Department. However, since the other four environments have transcended a primarily battlefield point of view (land for farming, oceans for commerce, air for weather prediction, space for communications and mapping, as simple examples), we will also attempt to keep the lens of cyberspace more open, as well. We present a few broader perspectives in Section 7.
As an overview, we will briefly revisit general notions about science and cyberspace in order to begin to create a common vernacular from which to launch this new Science of Cyberspace. None of these notions are intended to be exhaustive, but serve to initialize the discussion of this “new” science from a level playing field. Borrowing from the literature on what are called Wicked Problems, we want to create a Shared Understanding about the baselines of science and cyberspace so that an ensuing discipline of a Science of Cyberspace has an opportunity to germinate and assist in our better understanding of this new environment.[8] We won’t attempt to present exhaustive detail in this introductory paper – there are few references and academic citations (that comes later). We just wish to get the discussions started in order to set in motion the creation of shared understanding. This is the Science of Cyberspace Version 0.1, if you will.
It’s worth discussing at this point the consequences of not having a Science of Cyberspace. Consider what it would mean to be without the sciences that help us explore the oceans, rivers and lakes of the world in which we live. The study of the aquatic parts of our world, while absolutely multidisciplinary, helps us fashion better questions and experiments we must undertake to more fully understand, exploit and enhance the waters that sustain human life. In some ways, understanding the oceans, lakes and rivers through oceanography, marine biology and the myriad physical and life sciences we have developed over the centuries is very much a model for how we will better understand and protect cyberspace. Without bringing to bear the right scientific disciplines and raising the right questions and experiments about the environment of cyberspace, we will never fully understand how to use, improve and protect it. Multiple disciplines and multiple perspectives are crucial to our understanding.[9]
Moreover, as we begin to understand the breadth and diversity of cyberspace’s integration into society, we must generate a candidate group of communities that can serve as examples of the different yet consistent ways in which cyberspace currently and in the future will affect humanity and potentially all living systems. We present initial example groups below, in Section 7. This is important to show the broad impact that cyberspace is having on so many facets of life, culture and society and to demonstrate the importance of considering these impacts from a standpoint of community and communities, all potentially interacting with each other.
One intuitive hypothesis we may start with is that cyberspace empowers the formation of heterogeneous communities more than any other environment known to man.[10] Of the five major settings discussed above, only the environment of cyberspace apparently originates with humanity and thus is most subject to human design and intervention, moldable through human behavior: this has important implications, as we will discuss.
Finally, a new world enabled by cyberspace has emerged that requires better understanding of both its benefits and its challenges to human individual and cultural evolution. Thinking about cyberspace in terms of emergence and the exchange-based interactions that drive emergence allows us to better visualize the changes we experience both individually and collectively as we navigate the future within cyberspace. Another recent invention that cyberspace has enabled, advanced computational modeling and simulation (such as agent-based modeling and evolutionary computation), are the likely keys to better visualizing the actual and possible changes evident within the environment.
Figure 1, below, helps to visualize the major interactions that take place to create both the opportunity and the requirements for exchange-based evolution and coevolution of the network (e.g., cyberspace) and its interacting elements. Exchange is at the heart of this interaction. The diagram also depicts several categories of emergence that are both products and ingredients of the coevolving world of massive interconnectivity that cyberspace enables.
There are two basic forms of networks that coevolve with each other through exchange and emergence that compose cyberspace: the physical network and the social network that accommodate the production of something useful to humans. Emergences from human and machine behaviors, culture, governance and technological characteristics all synergize to produce what we recognize as cyberspace. The services that we introduce to make cyberspace valuable and the threats to those services and accesses are also part of the coevolving landscapes that we call cyberspace. Finally, both natural and artificial (e.g., mad-made) adaptations and evolution take place that ensure cyberspace is a constantly changing, coevolving environment that truly requires scientific methods to study and understand it.
Figure 1 – Emergence and Evolution of the Network
Figure 1 should also serve to demonstrate how these interactions are more than interesting features of cyberspace, they are also codependent, coevolving consequences of cyberspace! They are the interacting parts of the ecology of cyberspace that compose the essence of the environment of cyberspace, including the threat.[11] All of these things are not only present, they are required for cyberspace to be meaningful to humans. We must understand them both in the context of our physical worlds and in the virtual worlds that emerge from these interactions.
The new domains of virtual worlds and massive social networking, as they will be enhanced by virtual reality environments, demand their own new bodies of interdisciplinary sciences. As military, other government, business and academic institutions begin training their students and members within virtual reality settings that harness the computational power of media we will experience new forms of individual and organizational behaviors that reflect these new technologies: these advances will happen within cyberspace. Cyberspace will change the way we behave as humans, which will have direct effects on the coevolution of our independent relationships with the rest of life. This must also be a part of the Science of Cyberspace, and serves as a central rationale for why we need a Science of Cyberspace Security.
2. What is Science?
In a general sense related to nurturing the growth and development of mankind, science is a formal means to overcome ignorance about life, our living environment and the interactions that produce and sustain life. There are numerous definitions of science that vary in source and scope, but understanding interaction, exchange and the resultant emergence from these interactions and exchanges are critical to any definition: that puts inquiry at the center of “the scientific method.” There is much debate about whether or not there is actually such a thing as the “scientific method.” Whether there is or not, there are valid formal scientific “methods” that evoke inquiry, creativity and discovery that we can apply to better understanding cyberspace, much as these same methods have been applied to the other environments in which we live.[12]
For the purpose of beginning the discussions on “defining” the science of cyberspace as a process for learning and producing a better understanding of the environment, we posit the following:
Science is an endeavor that empowers inquiry and discovery of interaction, exchange and emergence, and enables invention and generation of new lines of inquiry through evidence-based methods that are observable, testable and repeatable by others.[13]
This is not an attempt to describe the broader topic of “science” but to refine other definitions of science such that they focus on the challenges at hand: defining the “Science of Cyberspace.” Such an attempt at defining science in this way, however, gives a practical flavor for the consumers of “the scientific method” where one offshoot of good science is meaningful invention and innovation, and their sibling technology. In this way, science can more responsively support operational needs.
Of all the other environments, none more than cyberspace have experienced the impact of invention, innovation and technology (and operational need) in such a brief period in history. This is likely to be hard, but rewarding work. An epistemological approach proposed in the executive summary of this paper will benefit all contributors as we seek to discover what we know about cyberspace and what need to know in order to develop good theory and experiments. Epistemology is crucial to understanding, as Morowitz notes.[14]
Scientific methods should allow us to uncover meaning and structure from diverse sources of information and observation so we can explain and predict the interactions and emergence of observed phenomena. As discussed in more detail in the next section, explaining emergence and the rules and interactions to lead to it give us a better opportunity to predict it, if indeed that is possible.[15] In a science-led study of the phenomenon of cyberspace, science will inform technology which might then lead to new inquiry and observations that can improve understanding of the environment of cyberspace. However, since a major goal of science is to explain and predict to enable discovery, technology may function better as the offspring of science, not the parent. As technology seems to be the driving force in the emergence of cyberspace (and the means to secure and exploit it), it is critical we understand the science to appreciate the role of technology as an enabler of cyberspace. For this, we require a Science of Cyberspace.
3. What is Cyberspace?
To jumpstart the discussion on what could be a Science of Cyberspace, we simply offer:
Cyberspace is a medium that connects humans, their stores of information and their organizations through a network of communications and computing components that accommodate various means of exchange and sharing of information in real-, near-real, and delayed time; these networked connections involve spectra and other electromagnetic media, components of almost any accepted definition of cyberspace.
This description, although deliberately vague and admittedly technical in nature, does elevate important aspects and distinctions about cyberspace that require study: people, information, time, technology, connectivity, exchange and collaboration. These seven characteristics, particularly those of the social nature, should be considered fully in any resulting definition of cyberspace as an environment.
The practice of exchange is interesting in itself, but when considered as a distinctive process of the phenomenon of emergence, exchange within the cyberspace environment becomes a source of rich complexity and opportunity. Exchange, whether of information, goods or services, provides the fuel for what is known as self-organized criticality. Systems that are at the point of self-organized criticality demonstrate emergent behaviors.[16] In fact, the SENDS Project focuses on cyberspace as simultaneously being a medium and a catalyst for self-organization of people and systems, as well as emergence and exchange in ways never before possible – this has significant implications as we discuss in later portions of this paper.
To further the discussion of these two key terms for the eventual definition of cyberspace as a medium and catalyst for life today, we posit that emergence is an outcome based on processes and interactions between local nodes (particularly within a social context as it applies to cyberspace), and that this emergence can only be observed in the results of interactions.
In hierarchical terms, an emergence is observed “one level” above the interacting nodes or components. Morowitz notes that emergence is manifested in “novel behaviors,” based on properties of the system or whole. “They are novelties that follow from the system rules but cannot be predicted from properties of the components that make up the system,” he writes.[17] Figure 2, below, helps visualize how these interactions occur, leading to an emergence. Note that for the purpose of experimentation and exploration of emergence, we propose that models and simulations may represent the best capability to infer (most likely probabilistically) an emergence before it actually occurs (as noted in the right hand column).
Figure 2 – Exchange and Emergence
In nature, Morowitz continues, emergence is a pruning action leading to the rise of the actual from the possible, and that these rules of nature that accommodate emergence are among the least understood of any science, but will in fact “be a major feature of the science of the future.”[18] To reach its full potential, the Science of Cyberspace will have to make progress in helping us understand emergence and how we might better “predict” it. For that reason alone, emergence must be considered one of the two critical components to explore in this new discipline.[19] The role that self-organizing criticality plays in these emergences is also important to consider, particularly in the massively connecting environment of cyberspace.[20]
The other important concept that this Science of Cyberspace seeks to harness is the process of exchange. Individuals and collectives are connected more deeply, synchronously and asynchronously, and capable of generating more shared knowledge than at any point in the past. Consequently, the processes of exchange have evolved through the maturing of sets of rules and the interactions between “local” socio-technical “nodes” increasingly accommodated by connectivity that cyberspace now makes possible. In emergence, local nodes interact according to their own rules to create a global behavior (visible at the next layer of hierarchy, as noted above), where such behaviors are typically very difficult to predict as explained by Morowitz.
Exchanges of information, goods and services take place more rapidly and through more connections than thought possible even a generation ago. A significant consequence of this new level of connectedness is that we lack an understanding of what this exchange-based “social” nature of cyberspace means to our recent history and all other forms of science and technology – we simply have not sufficiently studied cyberspace and the hyper-connectivity it empowers. Connected collectivity, a concept dated to at least the early studies of physics and biology, changes things and produces cascading effects in many aspects of life we do not yet appreciate.[21] It took decades and centuries to work out the sciences of the physical environments as we understand them today and we expect it will take many years to do the same for cyberspace.[22]
If emergence can ever be controlled and thus predicted, it likely will be through better understanding and articulation of the rules of exchange and the interconnecting frameworks that empower the process of exchange and self-organizing criticality. The effects of these rules on emergence are filtered through many other factors within cyberspace that may or may not be controllable (or even knowable), but the rules we could uncover and with which we could experiment are primarily based on natural laws or man-made principles and thus potentially observable and capable of contributing to a better understanding of emergence.[23]
It is important to describe at this point an initial approach to understanding rules of interaction from a societal standpoint that reflects the results (emergences, if you will) of cultural and political relationships. For this brief discussion we turn to the thoughts of political scientist Tom Barnett, an internationally known thinker about the role of “rule sets” in new and future national and international forms of organization.[24]
To begin, there is a major problem about understanding the rules that accommodate political and social interaction. That problem is the jargon that “experts” use as shorthand to describe the rules and operating environment, as Barnett notes.[25] Creating shared understanding about the environment of cyberspace will require significant progress in explaining the rules and creating transparency in the use of them, hence another rationale for the Wicked Problem approach as described earlier.[26]
Most rules of interaction are originally driven from the bottom up based on new opportunities for people to communicate or exchange. Socially useful rules are tested by experience and become formalized over time based on their success in creating a level playing field between participants of the exchange and in fostering worthwhile interdependencies. Rules are often violated of course, frequently by those seeking an edge in the exchange or relationship, which seems to be more related to human nature than to the “formal” rule-based process of exchange.
In addition, there must be a match-up of compatible rule sets between participants. As Barnett points out, it’s important to play baseball by baseball rules and not football rules or the result may be a collapse into chaos.[27] The more understanding we have about the rules of the exchange process the better chance we have of visualizing the nature of the interdependencies of the participants and the likely outcome of the exchange: the emergence.
Focusing on emergence through exchange, the rules and the interdependencies they create may be our best shot at explanation and prediction as a part of developing and integrating a Science of Cyberspace and our best window for near-term contribution. Barnett seems to agree in a recent paper on deterrence in cyberspace: “the dynamic management of rule sets (e.g., compliance, security, performance metrics, systems integration) is the best path forward for creating resiliency in the face of an unlimited pool of potential threats.”[28] Barnett’s recommendations on rule sets offers to inform the development of our new science.
There are historical contexts, also. For centuries human communications networks remained unchanged and stable. There were two main ways to transfer information, by land or by sea. The key element in the time to transfer information was the geographic distance between the two parties. Connecting technologies in past times, including the transformational development of the road network in ancient Rome, for example, certainly inspired future forms of connectivity. Unfortunately, these same roads also provided access for raiders, highwaymen, and even enemy forces, much the same as the computer networks we all use today.[29]
Speed of transmission, however, as well as storage and processing of information along such transportation and connecting media such as the Roman road network, took place in environments that could not leverage the levels of mass connectivity that existed once modern physics began to permeate human thinking. While the connectivity of ancient times could be transformational to some aspects of life, it was not as globally and pervasively transformational as has been cyberspace in the last 20-30 years.
With the advent of the telegraph, radio and the telephone, distance was no longer a factor; rather, volume and information retention become the more dominate factors, often restricted by human memory and note-taking. Cyberspace began bridging all those gaps from its inception and now geographic location and distance have become negligible factors; the technical inhibitions against transfer and storage of information have also been largely overcome. Connected collectivity, operating at the speed of cyberspace still presents challenges to perception and understanding, however. Social humans are the ultimate users of cyberspace, after all.
Cyberspace also enables connected collectivity in multiple measures of time, unlike any previous form of communications man has generated, solidifying the case of its status as one of the five most important environments sustaining human life. How and why this occurs raises the major rationale for a Science of Cyberspace: the notion of exploration, discovery, prediction and explanation in an objective and testable manner. While there are ongoing pockets of research investigating parts of cyberspace, there is yet no cohesive body of science yet that guides us through our exploration: cyberspace is too new for that focus to yet take hold.
Compounding the challenge of understanding is the rate of change cyberspace undergoes: it was just 15 years ago that e-mail became relatively common place—today, for better or worse, it is a major workflow tool. Broadband is only now empowering the majority of society’s connectivity, and we are just the first few years into the internetworked-based social networking phenomena. The former ways of knowledge accumulation and transfer were tried and true and had been in use for so long humans could not imagine alternate methods until cyberspace was developed: exploitation of electromagnetic spectrum-based technologies such as radio and telephony changed the way people thought about communications and even collaboration. Cyberspace now does the same.
Cyberspace requires both broader and deeper explanation. History has simultaneously supported and restrained its further exploration and exploitation, as has human nature and behavior. We must push beyond the boundaries in order to fully explore and exploit cyberspace. Now that the 21st century is well underway and many of us have become so accustomed to the rates of change of new communications methods nothing seems to surprise us any longer. Nonetheless, human behavior introduces constant surprises. These changes and surprises, and the profound impacts on human culture and emerging societies, both physical and virtual, demand in-depth and systematic formulation of cyberspace understanding and knowledge. Recent progress in the social sciences will be critical to our understanding. For all of these reasons, it will likely be difficult to “define” cyberspace but well worth the effort.
4. The Science of Cyberspace
To start a dialogue about Cyberspace Science, we initially suggest the following:
The Science of Cyberspace is a multidisciplinary study of the first nearly ubiquitous, man-made environment in which we seek understanding of its physical, social and organizational impacts on nearly all aspects of life on this planet.
In this regard, a scientific discipline that explains and predicts the nature of the connected collectivity that cyberspace enables is just as necessary as the sciences that help us better understand life as a consequence and component of the equally interconnecting physical environments of air, land, water and space. The impacts and interdependencies between man and nature within the physical environment are well studied, if not yet universally understood. This is not the case for cyberspace. With cyberspace’s ever increasing significance to our lives and society, the connected collectivity it enables is extending beyond just humans to our impact on the future of all forms of life and we are only beginning to grasp what is happening.
Modern societies and organizations have become just as dependent on the environment of cyberspace and the elements that compose it as they have on the physical components of this world – adherents to a “return to the old days” before computers don’t realize how critically dependent we’ve become on internet-based connectivity. Even the most rudimentary of services and technologies rely on modern communications systems in some form or fashion to function.
Any attempt to explore, understand and exploit cyberspace requires the major disciplines of science we appreciate today: biology (because of the evolutionary growth of cyberspace); physics (because of the physical/electrical composition of the medium); social sciences (because of the phenomenon of human connected collectivity); and mathematics, economics and computer science (because of the real requirement to model the dynamics of a constantly emergent state that seeks but never attains equilibrium).[30] Of course, there will also be other disciplines we must bring to bear.
The Science of Cyberspace leverages the convergence of the natural and social sciences towards a further shared understanding of how and what cyberspace truly is, both physically and socially. Going back to the challenge of defining cyberspace, the Science of Cyberspace’s accumulation of new knowledge and understanding will help us refine our definition of cyberspace into a more fact-based proposition. This foundational understanding will provide the intellectual stimuli for further cyberspace advances. Continued experimentation using agent-based modeling techniques, as suggested in Figure 2, above, should also help us better understand what Cyberspace is and how it enables human interaction.
At this point, we revisit emergence, exchange and self-organized criticality as effects we could potentially observe and measure through successful study and experimentation as a part of a Science of Cyberspace. Building up towards an observation of an emergent behavior, consider exchange as a part of cyberspace science. Referring back to Figure 2 may help to better visualize the interactions discussed.
Researcher/science author Matt Ridley notes: “Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty.”[31] Exchange is the engine and process that kindles emergence. In cyberspace, Ridley writes, “The Internet may be the best forum for crime, but it also the best forum for free and fair exchange the world has ever seen.”[32] In fact, “specialized production/diversified consumption” accommodated by cyberspace, “turns out to be the key to prosperity,” Ridley concludes[33] In his discussions on the rise of early forms of trade-based “globalization” (as far back as 5000 BCE), author Harold Bloom substantiates Ridley’s ideas of exchanged-based prosperity emerging in early civilizations.[34] These are key arguments for developing a Science of Cyberspace that explains and predicts the interactions of exchange leading to the emergence of prosperity in the future.
If exchange might be the fuel for emergence, self-organized criticality serves as the transmission for it. As Bak has commented, self-organized critical systems are self-tuning, and in his well-known example of a sand-pile constantly organizing itself through avalanches of differing sizes, one can visualize the growth of cyberspace through similar types of “avalanches”.[35] Bak points out that generally speaking, “systems in balance are not complex” nor is chaos complex.[36] Instability and lack of equilibrium conditions are fundamental ideas related to both the complex adaptive systems and to emergence.[37] It should be possible to visualize that cyberspace follows the same principles, increasing the demand for a science by which to study it.
Finally, the observance of emergence must be a fundamental object of study within this new science. Bak said that emergence is essentially the outcome of interactions where the results “are not observable consequences of the underlying dynamical rules.”[38] Put another way by Morowitz: “Emergence is the opposite of reduction. The latter tries to move from the whole to the parts…The former tried to generate the properties of the whole from an understanding of parts.” [39] Interactions (or exchanges), self-organizing criticality and emergence thus offer us insightful clues as to what we should seek to explain and predict in this new science.
Based on what we know now, however, we can better appreciate the impact of cyberspace in modern life by imagining existence in a nation such as the United States without electricity, academic research, running water, traffic lights, interconnected governments, a functioning financial system, modern hospitals and public transportation. Loss of these and many other cyberspace-dependent elements of modern life would cripple our nation just as sure as a loss of access to the oceans or the lands were they someday polluted beyond utility or barricaded against our right to use them.
Because of the ubiquity of cyberspace in our lives, it is just as important to protect cyberspace as it is the other four environments. Therefore, cyberspace security deserves special mention in this general discussion of science, cyberspace and a Science of Cyberspace because there is a pressing need to coevolve this new Science of Cyberspace with the sub-discipline of the Science of Cyberspace Security.
As we yet have no formal science for cyberspace, technology has been a stand-in for science when it comes to better understanding both cyberspace and cyberspace security.[40] Given that so much of our global and national infrastructures fundamentally depend on the reliability and security of the information that resides in cyberspace, allowing technology to “create” the science is not prudent. Without this science we will fail to appreciate what is emerging around us and worse, fail to discriminate the differences between “good” and “bad” futures in terms of what offers to improve humanity and other living systems and what simply exploits life without purpose. In today’s hyper-connected world then, a scientific approach to cyberspace security is only slightly less important than developing the overall science of the cyberspace environment, and they must be developed in parallel.
5. The Science of Cyberspace Security
To date, our nation demonstrates far more interest in the security of cyberspace than the understanding of it. The Administration recently named a Cyberspace Czar who is actually a Cyberspace Security Czar, and there has even been discussion in the US Senate of a Cabinet-level position to lead efforts to protect the nation’s information technology resources.[41] The intent of this thinking seems to be directed towards national security and appears prudent.
Cyberspace security is a critically required function, but our attempts to demonstrate leadership in this manner still reflects our search for a technological rather than scientific solution space. Technology has become a replacement for science when it comes to understanding cyberspace, and that is due in large part to our failure to better understand the social nature of the environment and its constantly interacting components. Most notably this includes the human component and humanity’s ever evolving interfaces to information technology and tools.
As noted above, cyberspace security seems to be closely related to what are known as Wicked Problems. Wicked problems are very difficult to define much less propose solutions to resolve them. This conflict in definition results in fragmentation in thinking about what is the “right” problem to solve and what is the “right” solution to apply to mitigate or minimize the effects of the problem-causing conditions. It is hard to solve a problem that defies attempts to define it in the first place. Thus, it requires creative thinking to properly define the network defense and security challenges we face in the context of an increasingly collaborative world. Designers, users and cyberspace security people are all part of “the problem” and must be part of “the solution.” In this sense, the social science disciplines apply to both developing the overall Science of Cyberspace (and Cyberspace Security) and in helping to seek shared understanding of the problem space for both definition and resolution.
Equally important, we do not understand the “arms race” that we have unleashed against ourselves as consumers and designers of information technology and security solutions, coevolving against terrorists, sophisticated criminals, and even state-supported attackers. This leads us to muddle along with incremental, technical solutions that drift further away from the original problems we faced in computer and network operations and security design. This drifting and fragmentation separates the problems and solutions and makes them increasingly unlikely to align. We clearly do not harness the power and insights thinking in terms of emergence might offer.
Our “solutions” must ultimately inhibit the arms race we face against existing and unforeseen adversaries and create a safer and more secure computer-based operating environment. A return to a more science-based approach, harnessing new thinking about emergence, exchange, social complexity and problem definition can lead us in an effective direction to tackle these challenges: social science must be at the heart of the problem definition and resultant solution space or else cyberspace security will remain an unsolvable, wicked problem.
Clearly, one of the key challenges of understanding cyberspace security is the intricacy of its problems and the lack of absolute answers. Traditional approaches to security in cyberspace tend to be linear: rules, governance, and reactive software and hardware fixes. This more-or-less linear methodology proved sufficiently effective during the early stage of cyberspace development and growth. Yet with today’s rapid growth rate of cyberspace connectivity, the interactions and influences to its security are growing increasingly complex. Today’s approach has been little more than a reactionary response to an ever increasing level of threats, leading to the call for “cyber czars” that are actually focused primarily on conventional, cause-and-effect based forms of security. Cyberspace security, treated as an independent and conventional discipline will only perpetuate the fragmentation of our understanding of cyberspace. This severely limits our ability to secure the cyberspace environment.
Finally, metrics are important to any study of Cyberspace Security. While no less important to the overall study of cyberspace, we also need to define and continually refine the metrics that allow us to describe what we are achieving in Cyberspace Security and how we can continually improve our outcomes. Tom Barnett offered some “big picture” ideas about meaningful metrics in Section 3, above, which may also inform our search from a political science standpoint, but other disciplines are also illuminating. After all, a Science of Cyberspace is imminently multidisciplinary.
Essentially, metrics are standard gauges to assess performance based on understanding what we are doing and measuring. This simple definition of metrics captures the essence of this important function of better understanding cyberspace and cyberspace security: we create and leverage standard “gauges” or measurements; we assess some performance or execution against those standard gauges, and we have an understanding (shared understanding in the context of Wicked Problem resolution) of what we are doing and measuring, and why. This leads to effectiveness first and efficiency in its proper supporting role (the old business maxim: first do the right thing, then do it right). In terms of understanding and maximizing the effects of cyberspace as an environment, these same principles apply, particularly when it comes to protecting, defending and securing cyberspace.
Most cyberspace security-related metrics have evolved. They tend to focus on security/defense of the network. The determination of what to measure has been based on finding things that are measurable, instead of determining what it is we need to understand. Metrics should play a primary role in helping us to better understand the overall environment. We need to learn as much about “why” things are as “what” things are. Metrics will not only help us understand, but will also help us experiment and evaluate, in a scientifically reproducible manner, potential solutions sets to known or identified problem sets. Within the context of the SENDS Pilot Study described in the introduction to this paper, the task will not be to evaluate the results of metrics, but instead to determine potential metrics and how to harness scientific processes to sustain their effectiveness and efficiency in measuring important criteria. Evaluation of the results is important, but will be an outcome, not the purpose.
Defining and resolving cyberspace security challenges require just as much of an interdisciplinary approach as defining and understanding cyberspace as an environment. This is why we must bear the challenge of coevolving the two new disciplines simultaneously while keeping above the fray of technical solutions applied within a domain in which we have so little understanding. The tools we use to distinguish cyberspace as an environment for exchange and emergence can greatly assist us in understanding cyberspace security if we are objective enough to apply them. We will continually define and refine (and measure) the people, processes, and technologies we apply to Cyberspace Security. First and foremost, however, science must lead technology, not be subsumed by it.[42]
6. Where do we go from here?
There are multiple directions we can pursue to coevolve the sciences of cyberspace and cyberspace security: cyberspace, and hence cyberspace security, mean different things to different people. The diversity of pursuits results from the many interests represented by individual and collective users of the cyberspace environment, some of which are described below. There are core science-based concepts that must interweave within these diverse approaches, however, and one of the first objectives of the Science of Cyberspace must be to identify and describe these core components on which to build.
Some of these core components are mentioned above in Section 4, broadly introducing the concepts of a Science of Cyberspace. More disciplines and avenues to explore will emerge as we take on the task of collaboratively documenting the science and begin to formally experiment within these disciplines. We must also develop effective modeling and simulation tools that harness recent thinking about evolution and complex adaptive systems. Studies of the science of network and routing theory, for example, have benefited from these relatively new approaches to understanding biologically-based complex interactive phenomena. We need a laboratory for the Science of Cyberspace and modeling and simulation tools provide us that experimentation environment.[43]
The next step from the perspective of the recently undertaken Scientific Enhancements to Networked Domains and Secure Social Spaces (SENDS) initiative incorporate several of these approaches. The SENDS Pilot Project will work with existing collaborative efforts to expand the original SENDS Consortium of interagency government, academic and commercial partners.[44] SENDS will undertake to pilot a Center of Excellence for Cyberspace Science which could be an initial organizing construct for the work described in this paper. [45] The SENDS Pilot will also develop a significant modeling and simulation effort to test cyberspace security-related concepts on trust and rule interaction within DoD networks, as well as draft specifications for cyberspace training and education as promulgated by other agencies and consortium partners.[46]
This effort to coevolve cyberspace science and cyberspace security science should also begin to collect the insights of subject matter experts to provide brief descriptions of the communities identified in the next section on “Why Should Cyberspace Matter to ‘Me’?” The insights we gain from these communities will inform both scientific research and the modeling and simulation efforts required to formally define and refine the sciences of cyberspace and cyberspace security. There is much to do but fortunately there is much we can do now and in the near future to move forward with these initiatives.
So, it is appropriate to solicit insight and begin the human-based interactions that subject-matter experts – the users of cyberspace – can bring to this work. We propose to do that beginning with future versions of the next section.
7. Why Should Cyberspace Science Matter to “Me?”
Cyberspace empowers connected collectivity, a slightly more technical term for a cyberspace-based community. Social and professional networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn are early examples of this sort of community, although collectives like these will likely continue to evolve in ways we may not yet imagine. The people that join these cyberspace-based communities have both similar and different objectives but adapt themselves to the constraints of the media while simultaneously expanding the boundaries – humans did the same thing within the physical environments and are still exploring the frontiers and borders of land, water, air and space.
We propose that the Science of Cyberspace be developed as “Open Source Science.” This means that anyone who is part of the environment can be a part of its definition and exploration. One of the efforts we must undertake is to solicit insights from many who can help in this work.
The communities we have identified in this White Paper are merely representative and tend to reflect groups of individuals that have some impact on government, academia and business. After all, these three categories make up the current composition of interagency collaboration efforts. These three do not form an exhaustive list, however, as exploration of our cyberspace environment will no doubt reveal: the individual and collective diversity in communities of all shapes and sizes are equally important. For the time being, consider the perspectives of these communities as starting points for the formal exploration of cyberspace, as documented by those that live and thrive within it. [47]
There is much more to be done in this area. We will solicit from many to tell us “Why Cyberspace Matters to Me?”
8. Points of Contact for this Document: Dr. Carl W. Hunt, Directed Technologies, Inc., carl_hunt@directedtechnologies.com, and Mr. Craig Harm, Third Wave Strategies, LLC, craig.harm@thirdwavestrategies.com.
Notes:
[1] The editors are grateful for the support of Dr. David Schum, George Mason University and his keen epistemological eye; and Mr. Willard Unkenholz and Ms. Kim Watson, National Security Agency for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Mr. Nelson Stewart, Hamilton, Ontario Schools, and Mr. Charles Hunt, American Battlefield Monuments Commission, also contributed comments and editorial content.
[2] Also known as SENDS (Science-based Enhancements to Network Defense and Security), the original project name.
[3] Or, as biologist Harold Morowitz puts it “starting with observation, developing theoretical explanations of the observations, and using these to predict other observations.” (Morowitz, H., The Emergence of Everything, Oxford, NY, 2002, p. 7).
[4] In early reviews of this paper, researchers have encountered challenging debates on the origins of cyberspace – clearly a precursor to the kind of challenges the authors trust will continue to arise. One of the interesting points of debate that have already risen in proposing to formalize and study the Science of Cyberspace is whether or not cyberspace was invented or discovered. If discovered, the implications that cyberspace has always existed, linking organisms and other forms of matter and energy evokes great opportunity for further debate, as well as the role of technology in trying to harness cyberspace. If in fact man invented cyberspace, other forms of debate will take shape, consistent with the vectors in which technology and new forms of work and recreation have already shaped mankind’s interactions in this “new environment.” If we in fact “conclude” we invented cyberspace, such beliefs may explain our embrace of technology over science to exploit rather than explore it.
[5] Of note also, it seems likely that mathematics is an environment created by man, although most of us don’t consider a living environment. With the possible exception of a handful of super-math “wizards”, we don’t interact socially or professionally within that environment, but we may be able to draw some insights from the conceptual man-made and controlled “environment” of mathematics. The insights on mathematics and the arts are provided by SENDS contributor Willard Unkenholz. This might provide insight in the man-made characteristics of cyberspace. The same may be said of the arts, so fields such as media ecology are listed as well.
[6] These insights are provided by SENDS contributor Willard Unkenholz.
[7] While DoD, DHS and others have written a great deal about Cyberspace (particularly as noted in the National Defense University’s work entitled Cyberpower and National Security, Kramer, et. al., National Defense University Press, 2009), we intend to keep a broader focus on the cyberspace environment in articulating the first draft of a Science of Cyberspace.
[8] See for example: Rittel, H., and Webber, M., “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences, Elsevier, 1973, and Conklin, J., “Wicked Problems and Social Complexity,” CogNexus Institute, 2008, available at http://www.cognexus.org, and Brown, V., et. al., Tackling Wicked Problems Through the Transdisciplinary Imagination, Earthscan Books, London, 2010.
[9] Initiatives such as the joint MIT-University of Southampton effort known as Web Science and the US Army-led Network Science Task Force also begin to justify this need. See “Web Science Trust” at: http://webscience.org/home.html, and the IEEE Computer Society Project currently listed under the Task Force for Information Assurance, headed up by SENDS collaborator, Jack Cole, Army Research Laboratory, (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tandc/tfns).
[10] SENDS contributor Kim Watson notes: “It is my belief that geographic isolation and ethnic co-location empowered the formation of community more than any other environment in the history of mankind…cyberspace empowers the formation of heterogeneous community more than any other environment known to man. As advances in travel and communication reached a certain point, the requirement for community to be strictly localized vanished. The environment of cyberspace not only encourages, but profoundly enables, individuals with a shared interest find each other, join in community, and evolve their knowledge, interests and actions regardless of physical location, social status, age, gender, ethnicity, etc.”
[11] Even the threat “helps” the environment of cyberspace grow and strengthen as part of an ecological process that helps us find new ways to build a stronger and more resilient environment against threats we may not foresee. The process of strengthening the environment against a given category of identified threats also helps us learn more about the overall essence of the network that can benefit from new services and forms of defenses. Again, it’s coevolution in action!
[12] Examples of the breadth of work being done in the application of multiple scientific disciplines to cyberspace may be found in the research published by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD, San Diego, CA (see http://www.caida.org/home/) and the Santa Fe Institute (http://www.santafe.edu/), Santa Fe, NM, as well as the citations above related to Web Science and Network Science.
[13] As noted by SENDS contributor Willard Unkenholz: “In conducting risk management decision analysis, we run into many, many variables for which there is no “empirical” evidence because we are unable to or have not devoted the resources to “measure”. As we incorporate the “social science” aspect of human perception, decisions and values, we will be dependent upon “subjective estimates or values.” If we want to include the “social science” aspects of the problem in our “Science (of Cyberspace)” we need to be willing to accept the social science evidence as well or we won’t be able to proceed as a unified science.
[14] Morowitz, op. cit., p. 8.
[15] As we discuss later, it may still be a challenge to accomplish prediction of emergence because even if we do definitively know the content of the rules, emergent behavior “cannot be predicted from properties of the components that make up the system,” writes Morowitz (ibid., 13). We have our work cut out for us, to be sure, but focusing on the outcomes through the lens of emergence may help clarify relationships of interactions that lead to the next-level behaviors.
[16] Bak, P., How Nature Works: the Science of Self-Organized Criticality, Copernicus, NY, 1996. Stuart Kauffman adds that systems that are self-organized critical exist at “the edge of chaos” a region that sits between an ordered regime and a chaotic regime. This is another way of visualizing a system that is poised to produce an emergent effect. See Kauffman, S., At Home in the Universe: the Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford, NY, 1995.
[17] Morowitz, H., The Emergence of Everything, Oxford, NY, 2002.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Morowitz also quotes computer scientist John Holland. Holland, in Emergence: From Chaos to Order, (Addison-Wesley, 1998) notes “For Emergence, the whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts,” in describing how both life and computer programming appears to work. This statement is often applied in other contexts, but is one of the most important points to understand about the role of emergence in cyberspace. Holland’s observation helps explain why the prediction of emergence is so difficult: we don’t yet have the vision, sensors or tools to see the whole by simply observing the interacting parts. Complicating the matter even further, we often don’t even understand the rules of local interaction, even when they are man-made!
[20] In fact, we propose the further study of the role of self-organizing criticality as a major force in the growth of hubs and “super-nodes” within cyberspace. See also, for example: Barabasi, Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else, Penguin, NY, 2003; and Watts, D., Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, Norton, NY, 2004. There is great potential synergy between their work and the thoughts of Per Bak.
[21] Connected collectivity describes a characteristic of cyberspace related to shaping the environment through relevant network connections (people and organizational networks vice computer networks). As an example, cyberspace enables emergent “basins of attraction” that pull relevant thought or key people in potentially desired directions without human intent or interaction – it can be very subdued in appearance. Thinking about this in terms of deterrence in cyberspace, for example, the connected collectives are subtle formations that respond to and produce emergent effects through the force of the connections we as friendly forces allow or deny: we often shape these interactions through engagement or denial in terms related to deterrence. Stuart Kauffman began to describe this phenomenon (Kauffman, S., Origins of Order, Oxford, 1993; and At Home in the Universe, Oxford, 1995). In Kauffman’s model, randomly pick up two buttons and connect them with a thread. Continue to randomly pick up buttons and connect them, eventually you will pick up buttons already connected to one or more buttons. Before long, the majority of buttons are connected in one large “collective” and around the ratio of 0.5 threads to buttons, a phase transition occurs in which there is a very large connected collective of buttons. One of this larger connective’s dynamics is to enable exchange and interactions that were not possible before the phase transition began, thus the emergent structure of the connectedness itself is a significant feature of connected collectivity. This is a powerful concept that drives much of the work in contemporary network (e.g., graph) theory. The study and modeling of emergence will be essential to understand connected collectivity because its structure can be so transparent as to be invisible to conventional network thinking. Once again, in thinking about deterrence in cyberspace (versus Cold War deterrence between the US and the Soviet Union), we begin to see glimmers of how we might shape the environment that could inhibit those we seek to deter through the creation of conditions designed to accommodate an emergence we desire (but probably cannot fully control). This is a different way of looking at “deterrence through emergence” and is worthy of more study in the context of a Science of Cyberspace. Better understanding of structure and rules may offer the best hope to shape emergence, hence the importance of the Kauffman model as a simple indicator of the potential “emergence shaping” offers.
[22] In a topic that deserves more discussion, it’s interesting to note the converging histories of formal thinking about the Science of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) with the beginnings of the recognized modern era of cyberspace (CAS is sometimes known as Complexity Science or Complexity Theory). The founding of one of the original homes of this “new” science at the Santa Fe Institute took place in the mid-1980s, writes Mitch Waldrop in his book Complexity (Touchstone, 1992). This roughly corresponds with the availability of personal computing and wide area networking through home-based dial-up access and mainstream business, government and academic use of relatively modern packet switched and frame-relay networks as the mass connectivity of the Internet finds it own origins. In other words, there is a case to be made for the interdependencies between broader levels of connectedness and the advances in thinking about complexity and human behaviors as the study of complex adaptive systems began to mature. Such a convergence of science and technology, producing the key insights Complexity Theory has may in fact be the true origins of a “Science of Cyberspace.”
[23] Morowitz notes that “Emergence does not mean randomness; it is an orderly unfolding of the world, but an unfolding rich in novelty.” Op. cit., p. 20.
[24] Barnett, T., The Pentagon’s New Map, Putnam, NY, 2004, and Barnett, T., Blueprint for Action, Putnam, NY, 2005.
[25] Ibid.
[26] See also Brown, V., Tackling Wicked Problems, op .cit.
[27] Ibid. Barnett speculates that the events of 11 September 2001 were a reflection of the rule sets of the United States being out of synchrony with other parts of the world. Barnett wrote: “I believe that history will the judge the 1990’s much like the Roaring Twenties—just a little too good to be true. Both decades threw the major rule sets out of whack: new forms of behavior, activity and connectivity arose among individuals, companies and countries, but the rule sets that normally guide such interactions were overwhelmed” (The Pentagon’s New Map, p. 27-28). Barnett goes on with a clear explanation of the mismatch of rule sets against the new forms of connectivity and relationships that emerged leading up to and following those decades that is actually quite informative to articulating several of the necessary aspects of a Science of Cyberspace.
[28] Barnett, T., “Deterrence in the 21st Century,” from Hunt, C. and Chesser, N., editors, “Deterrence 2.0: Deterring Violent Non-State Actors in Cyberspace,” a report for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Director, Defense Research and Engineering Strategic Multilayer Assessment Program, January 2008.
[29] The editors thank Mr. Charles “Jack” Holt of DoD’s Emerging Strategies Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Public Affairs Office for these ideas about Roman road networks.
[30] Morowitz, op. cit., p. 10. Morowitz points out that “Complex systems are generally far from equilibrium” thus increasing the difficulty of expressing these systems in mathematical contexts. It seems more likely that modeling environments such as agent-based models and their rendering of probability-based outcome distributions will be more effective in helping us visualize the interactions and potential expressions of emergent systems.
[31] Ridley, M., The Rational Optimist, Harper-Collins, NY, 2010 (p. 71).
[32] Ibid., p. 100.
[33] Ibid., p. 149.
[34] Bloom, H., The Global Brain, Wiley, NY, 2000 (pp 110-108). Also, Bloom’s five element model of complex adaptive systems greatly informs the discussions of exchange and emergence as key components of a Science of Cyberspace (see for example, Chapter Four).
[35] Think back to Barabasi’s and Watts’ references on the varying sizes of hubs or nodes in the Internet that composes a large segment of cyberspace, where there are a few very large nodes, many very small nodes, and varying numbers of intermediate-sized nodes, all of which that tend to follow power-law distributions. Power law distributions, a concept from physics, reflect a great deal about the characteristics of cyberspace. Bak’s example of the sand pile is a good way to visualize this concept.
[36] Bak, op. cit. (pp 28-30).
[37] Ibid. (p. 32)
[38] Ibid. (p. 26)
[39] Morowitz, op. cit., (p. 14). Morowitz maintains that “Both approaches can mutually self-consistent,” as well as quite useful to better understanding emergence from a holistic perspective.
[40] As noted by contributor Willard Unkenholz: “Over the years, when it comes to the basis for many of our Cyber Defense “solutions”, many of us have been talking about our current Information Assurance as akin to “alchemy” and we need to move it to a science.”
[41] Interestingly, the US State Department has recently mentioned the creation of a role that could be labeled “US Ambassador to Cyberspace” although any job description is premature yet and it’s unclear concerning such a position in relation to the security of cyberspace. At any rate, it’s important to think in terms of Cyberspace Diplomacy, and this move seems welcome to the quest for better cyberspace security. See also Hunt, C. “The US Ambassador to Cyberspace;” http://sendsonline.blogspot.com/2010/10/us-ambassador-to-cyberspace.html, 10 October 2010, for details about pending legislation and other US government perspectives on this proposal.
[42] Again, the idea of emergence is important. A discussion of the topic of emergent cyber security (or cyber-based intelligence, or anything else that involves the principles of cyber-based interconnectivity), requires us to think in terms of how to produce an environment for interactions that harnesses exchange and coevolution.
Emergence is happening all around us, and in both organic and inorganic worlds it expresses itself through evolution and co-evolution. “All evolution is co-evolution” writes Morowitz in The Emergence of Everything, op. cit. This simply means that things evolve primarily because something else has changed. While there are also random mutations to consider, things change because other things change. And when these things change, they often express themselves through unpredictable interactions that leave a trail of complexity and surprise: they emerge. That would indicate that the idea of engineering solutions that result in desirable emergent outcomes is going to be very difficult, but if we understand that limitation, based on a solid grounding in the principles of emergence, we may at least be able to produce and work within an environment that looks for and measures emergence as it is occurring. Measurement, if possible, is important – that’s also a goal of emergence thinking.
[43] Harm, C., “Cyberspace’s Laboratory,” http://sendsonline.blogspot.com/2010/10/cyberspaces-laboratory_13.html, 13 October 2010.
[44] The early work in this collaboration is visible in the SENDS Collaboration Substrate at: http://www.sends.wikispaces.net/.
[45] Hunt, C., “A Center for the Science of Cyberspace,” http://sendsonline.blogspot.com/2010/10/center-for-science-of-cyberspace.html, 19 October 2010.
[46] Amis, G., and Hunt, C., “The Importance of Modeling – SENDSim,” http://sendsonline.blogspot.com/2010/10/importance-of-modeling-sendsim-part-2.html, 1 October 2010.
[47] As proposed by contributor Kim Watson: “Regarding the section of policy, legal community, etc: throughout history, man has created societal norms, rules of conduct, boundaries of interaction, and penalties in an effort to protect the whole at the expense of the few. Because of how communities/societies evolved based on geography, then ethnicity, etc., all of the current institutions that support the definition, implementation, and enforcement of these norms and/or sets of norms (e.g., Muslims in one country will have a different set of norms to conform to than Christians in that same country) are bound by physical constraints and interwoven with other cultural aspects associated with that physical constraint. But cyberspace has no physical (location, ethnicity, age, etc) boundaries with respect to the communities that it enables and empowers. By the very nature of human history, communities and societies have always self generated the authority for determining and enforcing acceptable behavior – but cyberspace has evolved with the direct intent of creating and supporting as many communities as can be conceived by humans. Current institutions of policy and legal authorities struggle to operate in any productive way when multiple communities arise in their physical jurisdiction – and the ability to openly, humanely, and compassionately support multiple communities is inversely proportional to the heterogeneity of the different communities vying for support. This states that Cyberspace as an environment must have mechanisms for defining, expressing, and enforcing codes of conduct to the multiple communities that use it, and those will have to somehow relate the many external policy and legal institutions that govern outside of cyberspace. This is just another reason why it makes sense to define a Science of Cyberspace at some level, because the Policies and Legal Communities of Cyberspace will represent characteristics of this environment and/or the communities that use cyberspace.”
