Antonio Roque, of MIT Lincoln Labs, has published some provocative papers to arXiv over the last year. These include one on cybersecurity meta-methodology and one on making predictions in cybersecurity. These papers ask some good questions. The one I want to focus on in this short space is what cybersecurity can learn from Carl von Clausewitz’s treatise On War.
This might seem a bit odd to modern computer scientists, but I think it’s a plausible question. Cybersecurity is about winning conflicts, at least sometimes. And as I and others have written, one of the interesting challenges about generating knowledge with a science of security is the fact we have active adversaries. As Roque tells us, generating knowledge in the face of adversaries is also one of the things On War is about.
One important question for me is whether Clausewitz interestingly presaged our current problems (and has since been overtaken), or if On War makes contributions to thinking about cybersecurity that are new and comparable to those from the fields of economics, mathematics, philosophy of science, etc. After a close reading of these papers, my stance is: I have more questions that need answers.
Continue reading What can infosec learn from strategic theory?