Disputation Thomas Reinhold: „Towards a Peaceful Development of Cyberspace: Challenges and Technical Measures for the De-Escalation of State-Led Cyber Conflicts and Arms Control of Cyber Weapons“

Abstract:
Cyberspace, already a few decades old, has become a matter of course for most of us, part of our everyday life. At the same time, this space and the global infrastructure behind it are essential for our civilizations, the economy and administration, and thus an essential expression and lifeline of a globalized world. However, these developments also create vulnerabilities and thus, cyberspace is increasingly developing into an intelligence and military operational area – for the defense and security of states but also as a component of offensive military planning, visible in the creation of military cyber departments and the integration of cyberspace into states’ security and defense strategies. In order to contain and regulate the conflict and escalation potential of technology used by military forces, over the last decades, a complex toolset of transparency, de-escalation and arms control measures has been developed and proof-tested. Unfortunately, many of these established measures do not work for cyberspace due to its specific technical characteristics. Even more, the concept of what constitutes a weapon – an essential requirement for regulation – starts to blur for this domain.
Against this background, this thesis aims to answer how measures for the de-escalation of state-led conflicts in cyberspace and arms control of cyber weapons can be developed? In order to answer this question, the dissertation takes a specifically technical perspective on these problems and the underlying political challenges of state behaviour and international humanitarian law in cyberspace to identify starting points for technical measures of transparency, arms control and verification.
Based on this approach of adopting already existing technical measures from other fields of the computer science, the thesis will provide proof of concepts approaches for some of the mentioned challenges like a classification system for cyberweapons that is based on technical measurable features, an approach for the mutual reduction of vulnerability stockpiles, an approach to prove the non-involvement in a cyber conflict and solutions for the challenge of marking identifying civilian and consequently to be protected IT systems in the cyberspace.
All these initial approaches and the questions of how and by which measures arms control and conflict reduction can work for cyberspace are still quite new and subject to not too many debates. Indeed, the approach of deliberately self-restricting the capabilities of technology in order to serve a bigger goal, like the reduction of its destructive usage, is yet not very common for the engineering thinking of computer science.
Therefore this dissertation also aims to provide some impulses regarding the responsibility and creative options of the computer science with a view to the peaceful development and use of cyberspace.

Freitag, 15. September 2023, 11:15-13:00 Uhr im CYSEC-Gebäude
(Gebäudenummer: S2/20; Anschrift: Pankratiusstr. 2, Darmstadt, Raum: 9).

• 11:15h öffentlicher Vortrag von 30min
• 11:45h Wissenschaftliches Gespräch von 60min
• 12:45h Interne Kommissionssitzung und Ergebnisverkündung
• ab 13:00h Empfang