The Critical State of Cyberspacs

NATO faces a critical challenge in cyberspace, operating in a "grey zone" where it cannot attribute attacks and thus fails to deter adversaries, while governments, businesses, and populations increasingly depend on vulnerable Internet and cloud infrastructure. Global connectivity risks disruption and destabilization, prompting a call for a new decentralized architecture that controls data paths and isolates effects through geofencing and federated networks. This approach, akin to air traffic control, aims to protect critical infrastructure from core to edge and fundamentally reshape the future of cyber warfare.

NATO is currently in a ‘grey zone’: increasingly being challenged in cyberspace while unable to attribute attacks, thus failing to deter. Simultaneously, many governments, businesses, and populations depend on the Internet and the cloud to function properly. This is a dangerous situation, since global Internet connectivity could get disrupted and destabilised. This chapter explains the basic principles from an overall technological perspective, and discusses the challenge of anti-access and area denial A2/AD in the context of global Internet disruptions. What is the contested area, what are possible effects, and can those effects be limited? Using a layered approach, we define the cyber ‘high ground’ as maintenance of and control over critical infrastructure, from core to edge, from hardware to software. To ensure each cyber ‘area’ can be protected in isolation but still allow global cooperation, we argue it is important to control which paths data takes in the network, similar to air traffic control. This requires a new approach to organisation: we discuss a decentralised architecture for cyberspace, and how the Internet can be structured using federated networks, featuring geofencing and effect isolation, that has the potential to radically change the future of cyber warfare.