North America & Strategic Technologies
About Centre
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The Centre tracks relations between India and the countries of North America. US and Canadian internal developments are also monitored to have a better understanding of their role as drivers of foreign and domestic policies. The large Indian diaspora in these two countries also serves as a bridge for strengthening bilateral relations.
The Centre also actively tracks and analyses trends in strategic technologies, with principal focus on critical technologies and their implications for national security. It addresses evolving threats in space security and cyber security, ensuring comprehensive research into these critical domains. The other mandate of the Centre is to undertake research on Biological and Chemical Weapons with a focus on studying the dangers of proliferation and terrorism.
No posts of Books and Monograph.
A dominant paradigm for militarised cyber operations, owing to a growing interest in such actions, is seeking an ability to strike back and launch cyber counter attacks immediately after being attacked. This commentary challenges view based on the argument that it leads to a contra-productive tit-for-tat game with no decisive or deterrent outcome. It argues that cyber attacks are information, which an initially passive targeted society can gather to refine and consolidate its cybersecurity and over time receive an advantage over the initial attacker.
The term ‘hybrid warfare’ has been used by American military experts for more than a decade already. However, until recently, there was no officially accepted definition of the term, and, thus, an ambiguity existed over its meaning. As per the analysis of recent local conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine by the US political and military elite, hybrid warfare is a conflict where actors blend techniques, capabilities and resources to achieve their objectives.
In this commentary, I will use strategic cyberwar theory1 to explain why India has a higher level of cyber resilience than several of its potential adversaries. Even if India has challenges in its government-led cyber defence,2 there are cyber resilience benefits to be drawn from the way Indian society operates, functions and is constitutionally designed and accepted by its constituents, independently of any cyber defence efforts. First, the concept of strategic cyberwar.
India, the IT nation, did not make a news splash at CyberTech 2014. That is worth a passing thought. Because cyber is the fifth and new domain of warfare, after land, sea, air and space.
The pressing issues around cyberspace revolve around internet governance, cybersecurity and drawing up rules of the road for the new domain of cyberwar. While each of these is at a different stage in its evolution cycle, cyberspace itself is facing a watershed moment as insecurities mount. The fragmentation of cyberspace seems inevitable unless there is accelerated movement on resolving the fundamental issues of internet governance and cybersecurity that have been hanging fire for well over a decade.
Just as the world was beginning to understand the various dimensions of cyberspace in general, and internet governance in particular, it received the rude shock of the Snowden revelations about the global surveillance carried out by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) in the name of counterterrorism. All kinds of electronic communications of US citizens and non-citizens alike were monitored. Phone tapping and electronic interception were part of this huge operation to collect a haystack of data in the hope of detecting terrorist links to protect national security.
In June 2013, President Obama met with President Xi Jinping at Sunnylands, California. The meeting was seen as a chance for the two leaders to get to know each other in a relatively informal setting so they could address the growing mistrust between their countries. While maritime disputes, trade tensions and differences over how to contain the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programmes were high on the agenda, cyber security—in particular Chinese cyber espionage—was the defining issue of this unusual summit.
The issue of cybersecurity as an issue for international security has captured the attention of policy makers around the world. A 2011 United Nations (UN) assessment found that only 68 of the 193 UN member states had cybersecurity programmes. By 2012, this had increased to 114 countries. Of the nations with cybersecurity programmes, roughly 40 have publicly identified cybersecurity as a military concern in national military strategies or defence white papers.
Cyber terrorism is a phenomenon that is gaining more and more attention. One reason for this is the concern that modern information and communications technology may be used in order to harm open societies. This concern also involves actual IT systems and the information generated being targets of advanced attacks. That way functions that are important to society could be affected. The term ‘cyber terrorism’ is complex. This article describes the difference between traditional and cyber terrorism.
In this era of complex interdependence, sudden disruptions in supply chains will not only hurt Chinese businesses in the US and elsewhere, but also damage the US economy as well as its reputation as a business destination.
By implementing the Protection from Online Falsehood and Manipulation Act (POFMA) 2019, Singapore is demonstrating resolve to fight the growing spread of false news and misinformation campaigns.
A cyber exercise – whether CyberEx or its successor – needs to be developed as a platform for practitioners and thinkers to test conceptual and technical skills under near-real-world whole-of-nation scenarios of cyber contingencies.
Given India’s dependence on imports for 90 per cent of its telecom equipment, the decision to allow Huawei to bid for 5G should be in line with the national interest, rather than taking sides and constraining options.
Every time a cyber security organisation comes out with a decrypter to counter the effect of GandCrab, a brand new version of the ransomware is generated by effecting a small fix in the code.
A slight push in the right direction would be much more productive and efficient, such as treating telecommunications as a utility rather than a market, and building innovation and IPR ecosystems rather than incentivizing licensed production.
India, the second largest smartphone market in the world, needs to encourage and incentivise its ICT industry to not only boost ‘Skill India’ and ‘Make in India’ initiatives but also provide cyber autonomy to its critical cyber assets.
With increasing advances in artificial intelligence technologies and machine learning, a new era of deep fakes has emerged, which has the potential to weaken the fabric of democratic society.
For a global build-up of cybersecurity, capacity building needs to be given much more importance than it has received till date.
The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is an arms control treaty that outlaws the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons and their precursors. This convention came into force on 29 April 1997. This convention is the effort of some 20 years of negotiations at the Conference of Disarmament (CD).
