Steps towards Monitoring Cyberarms Compliance

Abstract

Cyberweapons are difficult weapons to control and police. Nonetheless, technology is becoming available that can help. We propose here the underlying technology necessary to support cyberarms agreements. Cyberweapons usage can be distinguished from other malicious Internet traffic in that they are aimed precisely at targets which we can often predict in advance and can monitor. Unlike cybercriminals, cyberweapons use will have political goals, and thus attackers will likely not try hard to conceal themselves. Furthermore, cyberweapons are temperamental weapons that depend on flaws in software, and flaws can get fixed. This means that cyberweapons testing will be seen before a serious attack. As well, we may be able to find evidence of cyberweapons on computers seized during or after hostilities since cyberweapons have important differences from other software and are difficult to conceal on their development platforms. Recent advances in quick methods for assessing the contents of a disk drive can be used to rule out irrelevant data quickly. We also discuss methods for making cyberweapons more responsible by attribution and reversibility, and we discuss the kinds of international agreements we need to control them.