Keeping Cool Steps for Avoiding Conflict and Escalation in Cyberspace

International cyber conflicts will become more frequent and intense. Several current trends prompt this pessimism: ongoing quantitative and qualitative cyber arms races among state actors, the proliferation of cyber weapons among state and non-state actors, a widely shared conventional wisdom that these weapons favor offense over defense, and no broadly accepted definition of the cyber attacks that amount to the use of force. In 2010, a United Nations group of government experts noted that the absence of redlines in cyberspace could foster miscalculations, misperceptions and, in turn, unwanted conflicts. With the rare agreement of the Chinese, Russian, and U.S. members, it issued a call, endorsed by the General Assembly, for states to discuss norms of behavior in cyberspace. While this action did not lead to any agreements on the contents and applications for such norms, the declarations on this matter by some states have clarified the ideological fissures that divide them. Their disputes over terminology and extent have also blocked adoptions at the regional level of less demanding confidence-building measures for cyber (iCBMs), which could reduce states’ mutual suspicions. Meanwhile, over twenty countries have created dedicated Roger Hurwitz is a Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a senior Fellow at the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the University of Toronto, and a founder of Explorations in Cyber International Relations (ECIR), a Minerva Research Initiative program at Harvard and MIT.