"Don't capture the flag"

Technically Rooted Norms

In Lawfare I critiqued an existing and ridiculous norms proposal from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. But many people find my own proposal a bit vague, so I want to un-vague it up a bit here on a more technical blog. :)

Let's start with a high level proposal and work down into some exciting details as follow from the original piece:

"To that end, I propose a completely different approach to this particular problem. Instead of getting the G20 to sign onto a doomed lofty principle of non-interference, let’s give each participating country 50 cryptographic tokens a year, which they can distribute as they see fit, even to non-participating states. When any offensive teams participating in the scheme see such tokens on a machine or network service, they will back off. 

While I hesitate to provide a full protocol spec for this proposal in a Lawfare post, my belief is that we do have the capability to do this, from both a policy and technical capacity. The advantages are numerous. For example, this scheme works at wire speed, and is much less likely to require complex and ambiguous legal interpretation."

FAQ for "Don't Capture the Flag" System

Q: I’m not sure how your proposal works. Banks pick their most sensitive data sets, the ones they really can’t afford to have attacked, and put a beacon on those sets so attackers know when they’ve found the crown jewels? But it all works out for the best because a lot of potential attackers have agreed to back off when they do find the crown jewels? ;-)

A: Less a beacon than a cryptographic signature really. But of course for a working system you need something essentially steganographic, along with decoys, and a revocation system, and many other slightly more complex but completely workable features that your local NSA or GCHQ person could whip up in 20 minutes on a napkin using things laying around on GitHub.

Also, ideally you want a system that could be sent via the network as well as stored on hosts. In addition, just because you have agreed upon it with SOME adversaries, doesn't mean you publish the scheme for all adversaries to read.

Q: I think the problem is that all it takes for the system to produce a bad outcome is one non-compliant actor, who can treat the flags not as “keep out” signs but as “treasure here” signs. I’d like a norm system in which we had 80% compliance, but not at the cost of tipping the other 20% off whenever they found a file that maximized their leverage.

A: I agree of course, and to combat this you have a few features:
1. Enough tokens that you have the ability to put some on honeypots
2. Leaks, which as much as we hate them would provide transparency on this subject retrospectively, and of course, our IC will monitor for transgressions in our anti-hacker operations
3. The fact that knowing whether something is important is often super-easy anyways. It's not like we are confused where the important financial systems are in a network. 

Ok, so that's that! Hopefully that helps or gives the scheme's critiques more to chew on. :)