Cyber Statecraft Initiative

Cloud computing is more than technology and engineering minutia—it has real social and political consequences. Cloud providers influence the pace and direction of economic growth, shape international security competition, and mediate access to technologies which today inform changes in the global balance of power.

The Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge is an annual cyber policy and strategy competition where students from across the globe compete in developing policy recommendations tackling a fictional cyber catastrophe.

The Breaking Trust project seeks to catalog software supply chain intrusions and identify major trends and implications from their execution. This project remains ongoing to highlight the need for a more coherent policy response together with action from industry and open-source communities.

The proliferation of offensive cyber capabilities (OCC) presents an expanding set of risks to states and challenges commitments to protect openness, security, and stability in cyberspace. As these capabilities continue to proliferate with increasing complexity and to new types of actors, the imperative to slow and counter their spread only strengthens.

Open source software underlies much of the modern digital world, enabling massive productivity and remarkable creation. That criticality, born of OSS’s success, creates challenges for resourcing, security, and long-terms sustainability. The future of the open-source ecosystem will depend on improved policy conversations, public funding, and bolstered industry support. This project remains ongoing to highlight the need for improved policy together with action from industry and open-source communities to support this critical digital infrastructure.

Operational technology (OT) cybersecurity encompasses the software, hardware, policies, personnel, and services deployed to protect physical systems. These systems comprise the backbone of national critical infrastructure and represent tangible links between society and its digital tools and data.

Mission resilience is the ability of a mission system to prevent, respond to, and/or adapt to both anticipated and unanticipated disruptions, optimizing efficacy and long-term value. Resilient mission systems should have the capacity to continue mission essential operations while contested, gracefully degrading through disruption rather than collapsing all at once.

The 5×5 series by the Cyber Statecraft Initiative features five experts answering five questions on a common theme, trend, or current event in the world of cyber.

The Cyber Statecraft Initiative has established a new project to communicate core themes and concepts in cybersecurity through a series of short stories in a way that is fun and approachable to a broader audience than conventional policy analysis/publication.