Taming the lawless void: tracking the evolution of international law rules for cyberspace

The myth that cyberspace is a legal Wild West has been roundly rejected by states and scholars. As cyberspace norms evolve, states will advocate interpretations of existing international law rules that advance their national interests. In this regard, states are treating international law rules as normative firewalls that safeguard their interests by deterring malevolent behavior. At the same time, states are interpreting the rules in a manner that maximizes their response options when facing hostile cyber operations

Turning Sanctions into Reparations: Lessons for Russia/Ukraine

Within the past year, members of Congress have introduced nearly a dozen bills to make Russia pay for its military aggression against Ukraine. This Essay argues that none of the bills are satisfactory because they would either violate international law or fail to deliver meaningful compensation to Ukraine. Instead, the Essay urges policymakers to use economic sanctions as leverage to compel Russia to make reparations through an international claims-settlement process

Complete Knowledge: Preventing Encumbrance of Cryptographic Secrets

Most cryptographic protocols model a player’s knowledge of secrets in a simple way. Informally, the player knows a secret in the sense that she can directly furnish it as a (private) input to a protocol, e.g., to digitally sign a message. The growing availability of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and secure multiparty computation, however, undermines this model of knowledge. Such tools can encumber a secret sk and permit a chosen player to access sk conditionally, without actually knowing sk. By permitting selective access to sk by an adversary, encumbrance of secrets can enable vote-selling in cryptographic voting schemes, illegal sale of credentials for online services, and erosion of deniability in anonymous messaging systems. Unfortunately, existing proof-of-knowledge protocols fail to demonstrate that a secret is unencumbered. We therefore introduce and formalize a new notion called complete knowledge (CK). A proof (or argument) of CK shows that a prover does not just know a secret, but also has fully unencumbered knowledge, i.e., unrestricted ability to use the secret. We introduce two practical CK schemes that use special-purpose hardware, specifically TEEs and off-the-shelf mining ASICs. We prove the security of these schemes and explore their practical deployment with a complete, end-to-end prototype that supports both. We show how CK can address encumbrance attacks identified in previous work. Finally, we introduce two new applications enabled by CK that involve proving ownership of blockchain assets

Russian and Chinese Responses to U.S. Military Plans in Space

Explores what countermeasures China and Russia are likely to take if the United States continues to pursue the weaponization of space, and what the broader implications for international security will be

Gene Expression Biomarkers of the Response To Sleep Loss With and Without Modafinil

Sleep disruption presents a substantial risk to health and safety, particularly due to the risks of performance degradation in safety-critical operations that can result in catastrophic injuries or mortality. Federal regulations exist to minimize the risks of fatigue with limitations on hours worked and requirements for fatigue risk management plans. Yet, even with workload controls and scheduled opportunities for rest, fatigue may be caused by factors such as personal and lifestyle choices, illness, and circadian disruption from travel across multiple time zones. Complicating risk mitigation is the challenge of identifying and measuring fatigue. Here, we report on gene expression biomarkers (biological indicators) for cognitive impairment during sleep loss. We observe hundreds of genes whose expression is associated with attention changes during one night of sleep loss. Several genes are identified that we previously associated with attention impairment in a separate study of sleep loss. The reproducibility of findings may indicate the robustness of these candidate fatigue impairment biomarkers. However, some biomarker genes only associate with certain tests of impairment (e.g., attention lapses but not self-reported fatigue), suggesting that different biomarker panels may be developed to assess the particular cognitive domains that need monitoring for a given safety critical operation. We also find that using a drug countermeasure (modafinil) not only helps mitigate impairment on tests of attention lapses, but also disrupts gene expression associations with attention lapses. Further research is needed to confirm whether this represents a unique effect of modafinil administration, or emphasizes the need to ensure biomarker validation occurs both in the presence and absence of countermeasures