https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141482 2026-04-08T19:12:34Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141777 Lost in cyberspace: Harnessing the Internet, international relations, and global security Choucri, Nazli; Goldsmith, Daniel Early in the twenty-first century, new, cyber-based threats to the well-being of individuals, economies, and societies added a new dimension to the well-understood threats of the twentieth century. For the first time in human history, advances in information and communications technologies are potentially accessible to much of the world’s population. These Internet based advances allow almost anyone to disseminate messages, meaning that a wide range of actors, state and nonstate, have the potential to disrupt networks and commerce with relatively little fear of discovery. In cyberspace, it is hard to know with certainty what is behind a particular action—and actions in one place can have effects around the world. A powerful example of how advances in cyberspace have changed the national security environment is the deployment of Stuxnet, a complex piece of malicious software that reportedly damaged the uranium enrichment facilities of Iran’s nuclear program (Broad and Sanger, 2010). Both Israel and the United States have been blamed as creators of the virus, but in part because of the nature of cyberspace, the origin of the software remains in dispute.1 Another apparent case of international relations conducted in cyberspace were the 2007 cyber attacks that overwhelmed the websites of prominent Estonian organizations, including public-sector agencies, banks, and media firms. Some Estonian officials blamed Russia for the attacks, but responsibility was never proved. Similarly, in 2010 Google announced that it and a variety of high-tech, security, and defense firms had been targeted in an attempt, apparently originating in China, to gain access to and steal valuable digitized information. The episode resulted in a temporary shutdown of Google’s China site. 2012-03-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141769 Cyber international relations as an integrated system Vaishnav, Chintan; Choucri, Nazli; Clark, David D The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the hitherto separate domains of Cyberspace and Interna- tional Relations into an integrated socio-technical system that we jointly call the cyber International Relations (Cyber-IR) system and to identify and analyze its emergent properties utilizing the methods common to science and engineering systems adapted here for the social sciences. Our work is an exploration in both theory and methodol- ogy. This paper (a) identifies the actors and functions in the core systems, Cyberspace, and IR, (b) disambiguates sys- tem boundary, (c) creates a design structure matrix (DSM), a matrix of the interdependencies among functions of actors, (d) analyzes DSM qualitatively to show multiple interdependent and heterogeneous Cyber-IR properties, and (e) analyzes quantitatively the differential importance of core functions as well as the impact of actor attributes on influence in Cyber-IR. This work forms a baseline for further understanding of the nature of the heterogeneous influences of the various actors and the various outcomes that could result from it. 2017-11-17T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141768 Institutions for cyber security: International responses and global imperatives Choucri, Nazli; Madnick, Stuart E.; Ferwerda, Jeremy Almost everyone recognizes the salience of cyberspace as a fact of daily life. Given its ubiquity, scale, and scope, cyberspace has become a fundamental feature of the world we live in and has created a new reality for almost everyone in the developed world and increasingly for people in the developing world. This paper seeks to provide an initial baseline, for representing and tracking institutional responses to a rapidly changing international landscape, real as well as virtual. We shall argue that the current institutional landscape managing security issues in the cyber domain has developed in major ways, but that it is still “under construction.” We also expect institutions for cyber security to support and reinforce the contributions of information technology to the development process. We begin with (a) highlights of international institutional theory and an empirical “census” of the institutions-in-place for cyber security, and then turn to (b) key imperatives of information technology-development linkages and the various cyber processes that enhance developmental processes, (c) major institutional responses to cyber threats and cyber crime as well as select international and national policy postures so critical for industrial countries and increasingly for developing states as well, and (d) the salience of new mechanisms designed specifically in response to cyber threats. 2013-10-22T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141767 Tight revenue bounds with possibilistic beliefs and level-k rationality Chen, Jing; Micali, Silvio; Pass, Rafael Mechanism design enables a social planner to obtain a desired outcome by leveraging the players’ rationality and their beliefs. It is thus a fundamental, but yet unproven, intuition that the higher the level of rationality of the players, the better the set of obtainable outcomes. In this paper, we prove this fundamental intuition for players with possibilistic beliefs, a model long considered in epistemic game theory. Specifically, • We define a sequence of monotonically increasing revenue benchmarks for single- good auctions, G0 ≤ G1 ≤ G2 ≤ · · ·, where each Gi is defined over the players’ beliefs and G0 is the second-highest valuation (i.e., the revenue benchmark achieved by the second-price mechanism). • We (1) construct a single, interim individually rational, auction mechanism that, without any clue about the rationality level of the players, guarantees revenue Gk if all players have rationality levels ≥ k + 1, and (2) prove that no such mechanism can guarantee revenue even close to Gk when at least two players are at most level-k rational. 2015-07-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141747 The cultivation of global norms as part of a cyber security strategy Hurwitz, Roger 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141706 Improving interdisciplinary communication with standardized cyber security terminology: A literature review Ramirez, Robert; Choucri, Nazli The growing demand for computer security, and the cyberization trend, are hallmarks of the 21st century. The rise in cyber-crime, digital currency, and e-governance has been well met by a corresponding recent jump in investment in new technology for securing computers around the globe. Business and government sectors have begun to focus effort on comprehensive cyber security solutions. With this effort has emerged a need for greater collaboration between research and industry fields. Despite much effort, there is still too little cross-disciplinary collaboration in the realm of computer security. This paper reviews the new trends, contributions, and identifiable limitations in cyber security research. We argue that these limitations are due largely to the lack of interdisciplinary cooperation required to address a problem that is clearly multifaceted. We then identify a need for further refinement of standard cyber security terminology to facilitate interdisciplinary cooperation, and propose guidelines for the global Internet multistakeholder community to consider when crafting such standards. We also assess the viability of some specific jargon, including whether cyber should be a separate word when used as a descriptor (e.g. cyber-crime or cybercrime), and conclude with recommendations for terminology use when writing papers on cyber security or the new broader field of all things relating to cyberspace, which has recently been dubbed Cybermatics, a term we also examine and propose alternatives to. By furthering the effort to standardize cyber security terminology, this paper lays groundwork for cross-disciplinary collaboration, interaction between technical and nontechnical stakeholders, and drafting of universal Internet governance laws. 2016-03-21T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141704 Who controls cyberspace? Choucri, Nazli; Clark, David D When Wikileaks released hundreds of thousands of Iraq War logs and diplomatic cables in 2010, a horrified US government sprang into action—but the classified information the government hoped to keep from public view quickly migrated to overseas servers, ensuring that it would likely never be suppressed. After an anti-Islamic movie trailer was posted on YouTube in 2012, the horrified Pakistani government rushed to block its nation’s access to the Internet video service—and, in the process, temporarily disrupted YouTube access around the world. Toward the beginning of the Egyptian revolution, the government of Hosni Mubarak tried to quell the cyber-based aspect of the protest by turning off the Internet, but that effort did little to alter the course of the revolt. China, however, continued to block searches for the terms “Egypt” and “Arab Spring,” with at least some success. Until recently, cyberspace was considered largely a matter of low politics, the term political scientists use to denote background conditions and routine decisions and processes. Over the last decade, though, cyberspace, with the Internet at its core, has clearly begun to shape the domain of high politics—that is, the national security considerations, core institutions, and decision systems that are critical to national governments. Those governments have long held a monopoly on high politics and are, in turn, trying to control the future of cyberspace, with, at best, very limited success. The field of international relations, rooted in 20th-century issues and theories, has not kept pace with the emerging significance of cyberspace; and as the empowered non-state groups and individuals of cyberspace and international politics now simultaneously shape one another, the potential collisions of law, policy, and practice have barely been identified. Before the international community can begin to minimize the negative consequences of those inevitable collisions, it needs to understand how and where cyberspace and international relations intersect and influence one another, and who controls those intersections. 2013-09-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141703 Leveraging possibilistic beliefs in unrestricted combinatorial auctions Chen, Jing; Micali, Silvio In unrestricted combinatorial auctions, we put forward a mechanism that guarantees a meaningful revenue benchmark based on the possibilistic beliefs that the players have about each other’s valuations. In essence, the mechanism guarantees, within a factor of two, the maximum revenue that the “best informed player” would be sure to obtain if he/she were to sell the goods to his/her opponents via take-it-or-leave-it offers. Our mechanism is probabilistic and of an extensive form. It relies on a new solution concept, for analyzing extensive-form games of incomplete information, which assumes only mutual belief of rationality. Moreover, our mechanism enjoys several novel properties with respect to privacy, computation and collusion. 2016-10-26T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141702 The order independence of iterated dominance in extensive games Chen, Jing; Micali, Silvio Shimoji and Watson (1998) prove that a strategy of an extensive game is rationalizable in the sense of Pearce if and only if it survives the maximal elimination of conditionally dominated strategies. Briefly, this process iteratively eliminates conditionally dominated strategies according to a specific order, which is also the start of an order of elimination of weakly dominated strategies. Since the final set of possible payoff profiles, or terminal nodes, surviving iterated elimination of weakly dominated strategies may be order-dependent, one may suspect that the same holds for conditional dominance. We prove that, although the sets of strategy profiles surviving two arbitrary elimination orders of conditional dominance may be very different from each other, they are equivalent in the following sense: for each player i and each pair of elimination orders, there exists a function φi mapping each strategy of i surviving the first order to a strategy of i surviving the second order, such that, for every strategy profile s surviving the first order, the profile (φi(si))i induces the same terminal node as s does. To prove our results, we put forward a new notion of dominance and an elementary characterization of extensive-form rationalizability (EFR) that may be of independent interest. We also establish connections between EFR and other existing iterated dominance procedures, using our notion of dominance and our characterization of EFR. 2013-01-22T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141701 Collusive dominant-strategy truthfulness Chen, Jing; Micali, Silvio We show that collusion and wrong beliefs may cause a dramatic efficiency loss in the Vickrey mechanism for auctioning a single good in limited supply. We thus put forward a new mechanism guaranteeing efficiency in a very adversarial collusion model, where the players can partition themselves into arbitrarily many coalitions, exchange money with each other, and perfectly coordinate their actions. Our mechanism bypasses classic impossibility results (such as those of Green and Laffont, and of Schummer) by providing the players with a richer set of strategies, making it dominant for every coalition C to instruct each of its members to report truthfully not only his own valuation, but also his belonging to C. Our mechanism is coalitionally rational, which implies being individually rational for independent players. 2012-01-17T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141689 The convergence of cyberspace and sustainability Choucri, Nazli This paper highlights the emerging synergy between cyberspace (a new arena of interaction) and sustainability (a new initiative on the global agenda), and their convergence on the global policy agenda. This convergence is at the conjunction of two processes, the growing pressures for transitions toward sustainability in the real context of human interactions; and the expanded, cyber-enabled opportunities for the pursuit of goals and objectives. This convergence, unexpected as it was, is a result mainly of the properties of cyberspace as we know it and those of sustainability as we seek to frame it. Reinforced by the role of knowledge in international forums, both cyberspace and sustainability are relative newcomers to international relations theory, policy, and practice. 2012-04-20T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141677 The right way Winston, Patrick Henry I ask why humans are smarter than other primates, and I hypothesize that an important part of the answer lies in the Inner Language Hypothesis, a prerequisite to what I call the Strong Story Hypothesis, which holds that story telling and understanding have a central role in human intelli- gence. Next, I introduce the Directed Perception Hypothesis, which holds that we derive much of our common sense, including the common sense required in story understanding, by deploying our perceptual apparatus on real and imagined events. Both the Strong Story Hypothesis and the Di- rected Perception Hypothesis become more valuable in light of our social nature, an idea captured in the Social Animal Hypothesis. Then, after discussing methodology, I describe the representations and methods embodied in Genesis, a story-understanding system that analyzes stories ranging from pre ́cis of Shakespeare’s plots to descriptions of conflicts in cyberspace. Genesis works with short story summaries, provided in English, together with low-level common-sense rules and higher-level concept patterns, likewise expressed in English. Using only a small collection of common-sense rules and concept patterns, Genesis demonstrates several story-understanding capabilities, such as determining that both Macbeth and the 2007 Russia-Estonia Cyberwar involve revenge, even though neither the word revenge nor any of its synonyms are mentioned. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141676 The next 50 years: A personal view Winston, Patrick Henry I review history, starting with Turing’s seminal paper, reaching back ultimately to when our species started to outperform other primates, searching for the questions that will help us develop a computational account of human intelligence. I answer that the right questions are: What’s different between us and the other primates and what’s the same. I answer the what’s different question by saying that we became symbolic in a way that enabled story understanding, directed perception, and easy communication, and other species did not. I argue against Turing’s reasoning-centered suggestions, offering that reasoning is just a special case of story understanding. I answer the what’s the same question by noting that our brains are largely engineered in the same exotic way, with information flowing in all directions at once. By way of example, I illustrate how these answers can influence a research program, describing the Genesis system, a system that works with short summaries of stories, provided in English, together with low-level common-sense rules and higher-level concept patterns, likewise expressed in English. Genesis answers questions, notes abstract concepts such as revenge, tells stories in a listener-aware way, and fills in story gaps using precedents. I conclude by suggesting, optimistically, that a genuine computational theory of human intelligence will emerge in the next 50 years if we stick to the right, biologically inspired questions, and work toward biologically informed models. 2012-04-24T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141675 Depleted trust in the cyber commons Hurwitz, Roger 2012-10-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141674 Introduction Clark, David D 2011-10-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141673 Introduction Choucri, Nazli 2016-12-05T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141672 Cyberpolitics in international relations Choucri, Nazli 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141671 Emerging trends in cyberspace: Dimensions and dilemmas Choucri, Nazli 2016-08-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141670 Cyberpolitics Choucri, Nazli 2014-05-15T00:00:00Z