The insider on the outside: a novel system for the detection of information leakers in social networks

Confidential information is all too easily leaked by naive users posting comments. In this paper we introduce DUIL, a system for Detecting Unintentional Information Leakers. The value of DUIL is in its ability to detect those responsible for information leakage that occurs through comments posted on news articles in a public environment, when those articles have withheld material non-public information. DUIL is comprised of several artefacts, each designed to analyse a different aspect of this challenge: the information, the user(s) who posted the information, and the user(s) who may be involved in the dissemination of information. We present a design science analysis of DUIL as an information system artefact comprised of social, information, and technology artefacts. We demonstrate the performance of DUIL on real data crawled from several Facebook news pages spanning two years of news articles

Expanding alliance: ANZUS cooperation and Asia–Pacific security

Is an alliance conceived as a bulwark against a resurgence of Japanese militarism and which cut its military and intelligence teeth in the Cold War is still relevant to today’s strategic concerns? Overview The alliance between Australia and the US, underpinned by the formal ANZUS Treaty of 1951, continues to be a central part of Australian defence and security thinking and an instrument of American policy in the Asia–Pacific. How is it that an alliance conceived as a bulwark against a resurgence of Japanese militarism and which cut its military and intelligence teeth in the Cold War is still relevant to today’s strategic concerns? The answer is partly—and importantly—that the core values of the ANZUS members are strongly aligned, and successive Australian governments and American presidential administrations have seen great value in working with like-minded partners to ensure Asia–Pacific security. Far from becoming a historical curiosity, today it’s not just relevant, but of greater importance than has been the case in the past few decades. To explore new ideas on how to strengthen the US–Australia alliance, ASPI conducted a high-level strategic dialogue in Honolulu in July this year. Discussions canvassed the future strategic environment; the forthcoming Australian Defence White Paper; budget, sovereignty and expectation risks; and cooperation in the maritime, land, air, cyber, space and intelligence domains. A key purpose of the Honolulu dialogue was to help ASPI develop policy recommendations on the alliance relationship for government. This report is the product of those discussions

Cyber Threats and NATO 2030: Horizon Scanning and Analysis

The book includes 13 chapters that look ahead to how NATO can best address the cyber threats, as well as opportunities and challenges from emerging and disruptive technologies in the cyber domain over the next decade. The present volume addresses these conceptual and practical requirements and contributes constructively to the NATO 2030 discussions. The book is arranged in five short parts...All the chapters in this book have undergone double-blind peer review by at least two external experts.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbook/1038/thumbnail.jp

NATO Code of Best Practice for C2 Assessment

This major revision to the Code of Best Practice (COBP) for C2 Assessment is the product of a NATO Research and Technology Organisation (RTO) sponsored Research Group (SAS-026). It represents over a decade of work by many of the best analysts from the NATO countries. A symposium (SAS-039) was hosted by the NATO Consultation Command Control Agency (NC3A) that provided the venue for a rigorous peer review of the code. This new version of the COBP for C2 assessment builds upon the initial version of the COBP produced by SAS-002. The earlier version focused on the analysis of ground forces at a tactical echelon in mid- to high-intensity conflicts. In developing this new version of the COBP, SAS-026 focused on a changed geopolitical context characterized by a shift from preoccupation with a war involving NATO and the Warsaw Pact to concern for a broad range of smaller military conflicts and Operations Other Than War (OOTW). This version also takes into account the impact of significantly improved information-related capabilities and their implications for reducing the fog and friction traditionally associated with conflict. Significantly reduced levels of fog and friction offer an opportunity for the military to develop new concepts of operations, new organizational forms, and new approaches to C2, as well as to the processes that support it. In addition, SAS-026 was cognizant that NATO operations are likely to include coalitions of the willing that might involve Partnership for Peace (PfP) nations, other partners outside of NATO, international organizations, and NGOs. Cost analyses continue to be excluded because they differ among NATO members, so no single approach would be appropriate. Advances in technology are expected to continue at an increasing rate and spur both sustaining and disruptive innovation in military organizations. It is to be expected that this COBP will need to be periodically revisited in light of these developments.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/msve_books/1012/thumbnail.jp

Stabilisation operations as complex systems - order and chaos in the interoperability continuum

There is little knowledge in regards to the influence of complex systems thinking on the strategic modelling of stabilization operations. To better control the impact of information asymmetry in such context, this study focuses on gaining an understanding on how concepts and principles operate in theory and practice. Particularly, this study explores how the complexity of the environmental conditions influences stabilization operations as complex systems. Second, it addresses subsequent influences on a system’s required self-organizing ability to differentiate and integrate its various sub-systems, their organizational resources and competencies. Third, this study regards the development and adjustment of condition-dependent capabilities as key to reaching a state of dynamic equilibrium while processing, distributing and exchanging information. The aim of this study is both theoretical and practical: offering complex systems thinking as an alternative for the strategic modelling of stabilization operations and supporting the debate over the extent to which integration is feasible and desirable

MODELLING & SIMULATION HYBRID WARFARE Researches, Models and Tools for Hybrid Warfare and Population Simulation

The Hybrid Warfare phenomena, which is the subject of the current research, has been framed by the work of Professor Agostino Bruzzone (University of Genoa) and Professor Erdal Cayirci (University of Stavanger), that in June 2016 created in order to inquiry the subject a dedicated Exploratory Team, which was endorsed by NATO Modelling & Simulation Group (a panel of the NATO Science & Technology organization) and established with the participation as well of the author. The author brought his personal contribution within the ET43 by introducing meaningful insights coming from the lecture of \u201cFight by the minutes: Time and the Art of War (1994)\u201d, written by Lieutenant Colonel US Army (Rtd.) Robert Leonhard; in such work, Leonhard extensively developed the concept that \u201cTime\u201d, rather than geometry of the battlefield and/or firepower, is the critical factor to tackle in military operations and by extension in Hybrid Warfare. The critical reflection about the time - both in its quantitative and qualitative dimension - in a hybrid confrontation it is addressed and studied inside SIMCJOH, a software built around challenges that imposes literally to \u201cFight by the minutes\u201d, echoing the core concept expressed in the eponymous work. Hybrid Warfare \u2013 which, by definition and purpose, aims to keep the military commitment of both aggressor and defender at the lowest - can gain enormous profit by employing a wide variety of non-military tools, turning them into a weapon, as in the case of the phenomena of \u201cweaponization of mass migrations\u201d, as it is examined in the \u201cDies Irae\u201d simulation architecture. Currently, since migration it is a very sensitive and divisive issue among the public opinions of many European countries, cynically leveraging on a humanitarian emergency caused by an exogenous, inducted migration, could result in a high level of political and social destabilization, which indeed favours the concurrent actions carried on by other hybrid tools. Other kind of disruption however, are already available in the arsenal of Hybrid Warfare, such cyber threats, information campaigns lead by troll factories for the diffusion of fake/altered news, etc. From this perspective the author examines how the TREX (Threat network simulation for REactive eXperience) simulator is able to offer insights about a hybrid scenario characterized by an intense level of social disruption, brought by cyber-attacks and systemic faking of news. Furthermore, the rising discipline of \u201cStrategic Engineering\u201d, as envisaged by Professor Agostino Bruzzone, when matched with the operational requirements to fulfil in order to counter Hybrid Threats, it brings another innovative, as much as powerful tool, into the professional luggage of the military and the civilian employed in Defence and Homeland security sectors. Hybrid is not the New War. What is new is brought by globalization paired with the transition to the information age and rising geopolitical tensions, which have put new emphasis on hybrid hostilities that manifest themselves in a contemporary way. Hybrid Warfare is a deliberate choice of an aggressor. While militarily weak nations can resort to it in order to re-balance the odds, instead military strong nations appreciate its inherent effectiveness coupled with the denial of direct responsibility, thus circumventing the rules of the International Community (IC). In order to be successful, Hybrid Warfare should consist of a highly coordinated, sapient mix of diverse and dynamic combination of regular forces, irregular forces (even criminal elements), cyber disruption etc. all in order to achieve effects across the entire DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT spectrum. However, the owner of the strategy, i.e. the aggressor, by keeping the threshold of impunity as high as possible and decreasing the willingness of the defender, can maintain his Hybrid Warfare at a diplomatically feasible level; so the model of the capacity, willingness and threshold, as proposed by Cayirci, Bruzzone and Gunneriusson (2016), remains critical to comprehend Hybrid Warfare. Its dynamicity is able to capture the evanescent, blurring line between Hybrid Warfare and Conventional Warfare. In such contest time is the critical factor: this because it is hard to foreseen for the aggressor how long he can keep up with such strategy without risking either the retaliation from the International Community or the depletion of resources across its own DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT spectrum. Similar discourse affects the defender: if he isn\u2019t able to cope with Hybrid Threats (i.e. taking no action), time works against him; if he is, he can start to develop counter narrative and address physical countermeasures. However, this can lead, in the medium long period, to an unforeseen (both for the attacker and the defender) escalation into a large, conventional, armed conflict. The performance of operations that required more than kinetic effects drove the development of DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT models and in turn this drive the development of Human Social Culture Behavior Modelling (HCSB), which should stand at the core of the Hybrid Warfare modelling and simulation efforts. Multi Layers models are fundamental to evaluate Strategies and Support Decisions: currently there are favourable conditions to implement models of Hybrid Warfare, such as Dies Irae, SIMCJOH and TREX, in order to further develop tools and war-games for studying new tactics, execute collective training and to support decisions making and analysis planning. The proposed approach is based on the idea to create a mosaic made by HLA interoperable simulators able to be combined as tiles to cover an extensive part of the Hybrid Warfare, giving the users an interactive and intuitive environment based on the \u201cModelling interoperable Simulation and Serious Game\u201d (MS2G) approach. From this point of view, the impressive capabilities achieved by IA-CGF in human behavior modeling to support population simulation as well as their native HLA structure, suggests to adopt them as core engine in this application field. However, it necessary to highlight that, when modelling DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT domains, the researcher has to be aware of the bias introduced by the fact that especially Political and Social \u201cscience\u201d are accompanied and built around value judgement. From this perspective, the models proposed by Cayirci, Bruzzone, Guinnarson (2016) and by Balaban & Mileniczek (2018) are indeed a courageous tentative to import, into the domain of particularly poorly understood phenomena (social, politics, and to a lesser degree economics - Hartley, 2016), the mathematical and statistical instruments and the methodologies employed by the pure, hard sciences. Nevertheless, just using the instruments and the methodology of the hard sciences it is not enough to obtain the objectivity, and is such aspect the representations of Hybrid Warfare mechanics could meet their limit: this is posed by the fact that they use, as input for the equations that represents Hybrid Warfare, not physical data observed during a scientific experiment, but rather observation of the reality that assumes implicitly and explicitly a value judgment, which could lead to a biased output. Such value judgement it is subjective, and not objective like the mathematical and physical sciences; when this is not well understood and managed by the academic and the researcher, it can introduce distortions - which are unacceptable for the purpose of the Science - which could be used as well to enforce a narrative mainstream that contains a so called \u201ctruth\u201d, which lies inside the boundary of politics rather than Science. Those observations around subjectivity of social sciences vs objectivity of pure sciences, being nothing new, suggest however the need to examine the problem under a new perspective, less philosophical and more leaned toward the practical application. The suggestion that the author want make here is that the Verification and Validation process, in particular the methodology used by Professor Bruzzone in doing V&V for SIMCJOH (2016) and the one described in the Modelling & Simulation User Risk Methodology (MURM) developed by Pandolfini, Youngblood et all (2018), could be applied to evaluate if there is a bias and the extent of the it, or at least making clear the value judgment adopted in developing the DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT models. Such V&V research is however outside the scope of the present work, even though it is an offspring of it, and for such reason the author would like to make further inquiries on this particular subject in the future. Then, the theoretical discourse around Hybrid Warfare has been completed addressing the need to establish a new discipline, Strategic Engineering, very much necessary because of the current a political and economic environment which allocates diminishing resources to Defense and Homeland Security (at least in Europe). However, Strategic Engineering can successfully address its challenges when coupled with the understanding and the management of the fourth dimension of military and hybrid operations, Time. For the reasons above, and as elaborated by Leonhard and extensively discussed in the present work, addressing the concern posed by Time dimension is necessary for the success of any military or Hybrid confrontation. The SIMCJOH project, examined under the above perspective, proved that the simulator has the ability to address the fourth dimension of military and non-military confrontation. In operations, Time is the most critical factor during execution, and this was successfully transferred inside the simulator; as such, SIMCJOH can be viewed as a training tool and as well a dynamic generator of events for the MEL/MIL execution during any exercise. In conclusion, SIMCJOH Project successfully faces new challenging aspects, allowed to study and develop new simulation models in order to support decision makers, Commanders and their Staff. Finally, the question posed by Leonhard in terms of recognition of the importance of time management of military operations - nowadays Hybrid Conflict - has not been answered yet; however, the author believes that Modelling and Simulation tools and techniques can represent the safe \u201ctank\u201d where innovative and advanced scientific solutions can be tested, exploiting the advantage of doing it in a synthetic environment

MODELLING VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT FOR ADVANCED NAVAL SIMULATION

This thesis proposes a new virtual simulation environment designed as element of an interoperable federation of simulator to support the investigation of complex scenarios over the Extended Maritime Framework (EMF). Extended Maritime Framework is six spaces environment (Underwater, Water surface, Ground, Air, Space, and Cyberspace) where parties involved in Joint Naval Operations act. The amount of unmanned vehicles involved in the simulation arise the importance of the Communication modelling, thus the relevance of Cyberspace. The research is applied to complex cases (one applied to deep waters and one to coast and littoral protection) as examples to validate this approach; these cases involve different kind of traditional assets (e.g. satellites, helicopters, ships, submarines, underwater sensor infrastructure, etc.) interact dynamically and collaborate with new autonomous systems (i.e. AUV, Gliders, USV and UAV). The use of virtual simulation is devoted to support validation of new concepts and investigation of collaborative engineering solutions by providing a virtual representation of the current situation; this approach support the creation of dynamic interoperable immersive framework that could support training for Man in the Loop, education and tactical decision introducing the Man on the Loop concepts. The research and development of the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles requires continuous testing so a time effective approach can result a very useful tool. In this context the simulation can be useful to better understand the behaviour of Unmanned Vehicles and to avoid useless experimentations and their costs finding problems before doing them. This research project proposes the creation of a virtual environment with the aim to see and understand a Joint Naval Scenario. The study will be focusing especially on the integration of Autonomous Systems with traditional assets; the proposed simulation deals especially with collaborative operation involving different types of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) and UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). The author develops an interoperable virtual simulation devoted to present the overall situation for supervision considering also the sensor capabilities, communications and mission effectiveness that results dependent of the different asset interaction over a complex heterogeneous network. The aim of this research is to develop a flexible virtual simulation solution as crucial element of an HLA federation able to address the complexity of Extended Maritime Framework (EMF). Indeed this new generation of marine interoperable simulation is a strategic advantage for investigating the problems related to the operational use of autonomous systems and to finding new ways to use them respect to different scenarios. The research deal with the creation of two scenarios, one related to military operations and another one on coastal and littoral protection where the virtual simulation propose the overall situation and allows to navigate into the virtual world considering the complex physics affecting movement, perception, interaction and communication. By this approach, it becomes evident the capability to identify, by experimental analysis within the virtual world, the new solutions in terms of engineering and technological configuration of the different systems and vehicles as well as new operational models and tactics to address the specific mission environment. The case of study is a maritime scenario with a representation of heterogeneous network frameworks that involves multiple vehicles both naval and aerial including AUVs, USVs, gliders, helicopter, ships, submarines, satellite, buoys and sensors. For the sake of clarity aerial communications will be represented divided from underwater ones. A connection point for the latter will be set on the keel line of surface vessels representing communication happening via acoustic modem. To represent limits in underwater communications, underwater signals have been considerably slowed down in order to have a more realistic comparison with aerial ones. A maximum communication distance is set, beyond which no communication can take place. To ensure interoperability the HLA Standard (IEEE 1516 evolved) is adopted to federate other simulators so to allow its extensibility for other case studies. Two different scenarios are modelled in 3D visualization: Open Water and Port Protection. The first one aims to simulate interactions between traditional assets in Extended Maritime Framework (EMF) such as satellite, navy ships, submarines, NATO Research Vessels (NRVs), helicopters, with new generation unmanned assets as AUV, Gliders, UAV, USV and the mutual advantage the subjects involved in the scenario can have; in other word, the increase in persistence, interoperability and efficacy. The second scenario models the behaviour of unmanned assets, an AUV and an USV, patrolling a harbour to find possible threats. This aims to develop an algorithm to lead patrolling path toward an optimum, guaranteeing a high probability of success in the safest way reducing human involvement in the scenario. End users of the simulation face a graphical 3D representation of the scenario where assets would be represented. He can moves in the scenario through a Free Camera in Graphic User Interface (GUI) configured to entitle users to move around the scene and observe the 3D sea scenario. In this way, players are able to move freely in the synthetic environment in order to choose the best perspective of the scene. The work is intended to provide a valid tool to evaluate the defencelessness of on-shore and offshore critical infrastructures that could includes the use of new technologies to take care of security best and preserve themselves against disasters both on economical and environmental ones