Some Thoughts on Topics, Trends, and Science

by Jack Holt

Some of the main topics within the federal government right now, and have been for the past 18 months, are transparency, participation and collaboration stemming from President Obama’s Jan 21, 2009 memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. Social Media is the enabler for these interactions with the public in an effort to listen to the public discourse and guide our efforts to inform the public understanding of what our departments and agencies do for them.

In order to effectively use social media as an enabler for dialogue with the public, we should also explore using it as the enabler for knowledge management of the departments and agencies. Web 2.0 improperly cast winds up knotted on the floor of the Knowledge Management boat. There are some efforts underway to study social media within DoD and we’re finding that social media is enabling more agile and effective operational responses. We need more studies. We need a social science look at Intelink, milSuite, and any of the other efforts being generated as well as an organizational science look at how these tools are affecting our operations. I expect them to be positive effects as my personal experience has been postitive. These spaces help me to define my tasks, enlist help, and to gather knowledge to complete my mission.

To have a robust dialogue with the public, we must have a robust network to dialogue among ourselves to have a robust and effective response.

So the topics are Open, Transparent, Collaborative, Effective, Efficient and Responsive Government; and the trends are in using social media to meet this vision.

Now is the time to apply the science to understand what it means to our organizations and our ability to respond.

Strategic Questions in a Tactical World

by Carl Hunt

My adviser in graduate school, Dr. David Schum, used to tell me it was rare that someone would “ask the right questions” in critically important situations. Dave, both a George Mason University School of Law professor and School of Information Technology and Engineering professor, knows what he’s talking about. I have always admired Dave’s position on inquiry and evidence, his specialties as a law professor, epistemologist and as true philosopher. I particularly like his emphasis on asking better questions about the world(s) around us. So have several important government agencies, but that’s a story for Dave to tell.

It’s the questions, not the answers, which most guide us in strategic thinking and understanding, Dave would point out. And equally important, it is the order in which you ask questions and experience discovery through responses to those questions that help you form strategies.

From the strategies we develop, we form tactical solutions to the opportunities and dilemmas the strategies pose and learn about exploiting insights the strategies and tactics make available to us. We make strategic plans, but execute tactics. To use the soccer and hockey sports metaphors, we try not to run or skate to where the ball or puck is now, but to where it will be – that’s where strategies and tactics converge.

Such an approach to discovery and learning is perhaps what best separates man from other species. Not only do we learn, but we also learn how to learn through inquiry, strategy and tactical responses based on strategies, as we make and test predictions. Our human essence drives us to be interested in learning and discovery, nurturing our intellectual livelihoods.

Dave Schum taught me that you may not ever formulate “the right questions” but you can learn how to ask strategically important questions, and set them up to maximize discovery and learning. Hence, I’ll pose some strategically important questions that SENDS and the Science of Cyberspace seek to ask. If we get it right, these questions will “set us up” for maximum learning.

Since the SENDS Pilot has four basic tasks, I’ll use those tasks as the organizing construct for posing the inquiries. I’ll only cover the first task in today’s blog but will present the remaining three tasks at the end to help us think about questions to pose when we come back around to those tasks in future blogs.

The first of the four SENDS Pilot tasks is roughly labeled: Build and utilize advanced Models and Simulations in network defense problems. I pose the strategically important question that is at the root of this task as follows: Given the hypothesized magnitude of cyberspace, what are viable ways to visualize and leverage what takes place in this environment?

This suggests several supporting questions of course, but in the interest of space I propose that this question is effective in shaping strategy because it focuses on the challenge of visualizing and thus better understanding what takes place in the cyberspace environment, most specifically network defense problems. It suggests that it’s important to visually interact with the mechanisms of cyberspace, which we have previously discussed as exchange, self-organization and emergence (discussed here and here). It also suggests that we leverage or apply what we learn.

As posed, this question prejudices us in thinking that cyberspace is a world of great size, but that’s an observation we now accept as valid after many years of experiencing its growth. We have also learned through experience that the magnitude of cyberspace, along with its underlying complexity, compounds the challenges related to defense and security of the environment.

The deep complexity of cyberspace recommends why we propose a science-based approach to understanding cyberspace and cyberspace security. It also compounds the challenge of orienting ourselves, e.g., visualizing, what goes on in cyberspace and what we do with what we learn. Since we ask about “viable” ways to visualize cyberspace, we are not presupposing there is one “best” way. Enough on the analysis of the question…

The initial response to this “strategically important” question is: use advanced models and simulations, the root of the first SENDS task. It forms the strategic level approach and sets the condition for the proposed tactical level responses: designing agent-based models and simulations that incorporate evolution and optimization, called SENDSim in previous blogs.

Visualizing exchange, self-organization and emergence through the laboratory lens of SENDSim that Craig Harm suggested in the last blog offers us an effective way to not only address the strategically important question we raise here, but to discover other important questions the response to which drive new discovery and learning. SENDSim, as described in these blogs, offers us a lab in which we can validate and tune questions, as well as form new hypotheses about the environment of cyberspace. It also offers a highly visual medium in which to observe what takes place.

Through SENDSim, we will build a modest but reasonably faithful representation of the complexity of cyberspace (admittedly on a small scale). This model will include significant social and technical interactions that take place within several of the domains that compose cyberspace. Using an iterative design and construction process, we’ll ask questions about the interactions we simulate and discover new, perhaps more strategically important questions to ask.

This process of visually informing an evolving inquiry process will enlighten us and subsequent users of SENDSim about even better questions. We may not know the “best” or “right” questions to ask of the SENDSim tool to start with, but we will learn not only about the modeled environment but also discover better questions to ask. This is at the root of the inquiry-driven science that drives SENDS, and in fact will drive all of the SENDS Pilot tasks.

The remaining three SENDS Pilot tasks are: Prototype a Center for the Science of Cyberspace; Review and Recommend Academic Curricula; and Expand and Enhance the SENDS Consortium. We’ve discussed a bit about all but the last task already (here, here and here), but will take up those tasks in future blogs as part of the process of asking the “strategically important questions.” Stay tuned for more!

Cyberspace's Laboratory

by Craig Harm

Cyberspace is an amazing laboratory for observation at the same time it connects us socially and professionally in real life. Our search for understanding in this living laboratory offers us a better comprehension of this extraordinary environment in ways no previously explored environment has been able to do in our history. As we refocus some of our best thinking towards better understanding cyberspace holistically as an interconnecting domain powered by the process of exchange and the outcome of emergence, we must consider cyberspace as a medium that enables exploration as much as exploitation. These two related ideas serve to frame the important questions we must ask to better understand cyberspace and fulfill the basic criteria of science: explain and predict.[1]

One of the foundational principles of empirical science is that knowledge is based on observable phenomena, capable of being tested for its validity by other researchers working under the same conditions. The accepted practice to meet these ends is experimentation through the scientific method. Scientists develop a hypothesis based on research and expectations. This hypothesis is then put to the test through multiple attempts to prove and disprove it. Using laboratories specifically designed for the purpose, scientists are able to create repeatable events which can be validated by other scientists.

For the “traditional: sciences, we are all familiar with how this experimentation is accomplished: Chemistry and Physics have specially designed labs (particle accelerators come to mind); Biology demonstrates experimentation in life through nature and evolution (as well as labs); Medicine has research and controlled studies. But what about the Science of Cyberspace…how will we accomplish the principles of observable phenomena and repeatable experimentation?

As cyberspace evolved, tradecraft and technology served as the basis for our knowledge of cyberspace and users and developers focused almost exclusively on technical solutions to advance an environment that we are only now beginning to understand. Yet any attempt to explore, understand and exploit cyberspace requires a fundamental scientific foundation, which the current technology-focused approach fails to provide. To gain this understanding we must better observe and experiment within cyberspace.

Emergence, exchange and self-organization are effects we could potentially observe and measure through successful study and experimentation as a part of a Science of Cyberspace. As we’ve pointed out elsewhere in this blog, the observance of emergence must be a fundamental object of study within this new science.

And, as we build towards an observation of emergent behavior, we must also consider exchange as a part of cyberspace science. If exchange might be the fuel for emergence, self-organized criticality serves as the transmission for it. So how will cyberspace scientists observe these elements of emergence? The answer manifests itself as it does for the traditional physical science: a laboratory specifically and uniquely designed for the purpose of studying cyberspace.

Whereas sciences like biology, chemistry and physics have concepts and laws that can be experimented with through visible, physical media, cyberspace has not yet revealed those laws. The challenge for experimentation within a science of cyberspace is how to observe the virtual existence of its complex concepts and laws. In SENDS, we believe this lack of a physical, visible media for experimentation may be overcome with models and simulations.

We propose that we begin to think of highly collaborative, multidisciplinary computer-based models as the science of cyberspace’s laboratory. Within the SENDS Pilot Study, SENDSim will be used as cyberspace’s model and laboratory to observe and experiment. This blog already contains entries which go into detail on SENDSsim so please refer to those discussions for more details.

As the SENDS Pilot Study progresses, we must look to the modeling and simulation effort SENDSim provides. It is an opportunity to not only look at the specific scenario of Conficker, it is more importantly an opportunity to prove the viability for modeling to serve as the science of cyberspace’s experimentation laboratory. Just as we think of the important role chemistry, biology or physics labs fulfill to those respective sciences, so too will modeling serve the same role for the study of a Science of Cyberspace. In a way it is ironic that we will use cyberspace to observe cyberspace. It’s really quite interesting that in fact cyberspace is a medium that enables exploration as much as exploitation.

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[1] Or, as biologist Harold Morowitz puts it “starting with observation, developing theoretical explanations of the observations, and using these to predict other observations.” (Morowitz, H., The Emergence of Everything, Oxford, NY, 2002, p. 7).

The US Ambassador to Cyberspace?

by Carl W. Hunt

Several members of the SENDS Consortium have reviewed the SENDS Science of Cyberspace White Paper. This paper proposes interdisciplinary ways to proceed in the development of such a body of science, including education (which in fact is a separate SENDS task, and discussed in an earlier blog). One important topic that was only briefly mentioned in the White Paper, however, is the policy and political science approach to a Science of Cyberspace.

In the White Paper we briefly discuss pending legislation that has gone to committee (Senate Bill 3193, “International Cyberspace and Cybersecurity Coordination Act of 2010”) and follow-up articles on the US State Department (e.g., here and here) about their potential responsibilities under such an act if it became law. While it is not clear if this particular legislation will be enacted, it’s apparent that at least some in the Administration and Congress consider the uniqueness and the ubiquity of cyberspace as an environment that requires a diplomatic presence in order to engage in the international emergence of globally present interconnectivity. Some observers quoted in the two articles cited even mentioned an “Ambassador to Cyberspace.”

It’s worth discussing a bit more about what such a diplomatic position might entail, what could be some of its contributions, and what SENDS might do in support of such an effort. Two recent publications point even more directly at the need for this discussion. The first, a Wired Magazine piece from the October, 2010 edition, entitled “Post-State Diplomacy,” raises the issue of how a nation-state like the US conducts diplomacy with non-nation-states within cyberspace. Although slightly irreverent in its approach, Wired presents a good point about diplomacy that we’ll take up in future blogs.

The Wired piece is particularly worth discussing in the context of new thinking about the “Global Commons” and the ways in which cyberspace is such an important component of it. This is brought out in a recent essay by Capt Mark Redden, USN, and Col Michael Hughes, USAF, “Global Commons and Domain Interrelationships: Time for a New Conceptual Framework?” from the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS). They discuss the Commons as air, sea, space and cyberspace.

The INSS paper tells us that for the last 60 years, it has been the responsibility of the US military to guarantee national access to the Commons (see US National Defense Strategy). Both military and diplomatic challenges in the last 10-12 years are changing this paradigm, according to the essay, with the domain of cyberspace bringing about the most acute challenges. “Despite its breadth of use within both the civilian and defense sectors, the U.S. defense community’s understanding of the full impact of cyberspace on military capabilities and operations is modest at best,” note Redden and Hughes.

Unfortunately, Redden and Hughes miss several important opportunities to discuss interrelationships of the “Commons” environments in the context of Interagency interdependencies and their own “interdomain” interactions. Fortunately, they do briefly discuss the issues in relationship to the DIME construct (Diplomacy, Informational, Military and Economic bases for national power) at least raising the visibility of non-military perspectives in US relationships in the Commons, including cyberspace.

Diplomacy is critical, not only for traditional reasons, but for what the authors call “expanding interdomain relationships,” which means all the components of the Commons interacting and becoming ever more interdependent. This is even more relevant when thinking about the domains of the Commons interacting within the context of how Whole of Government entities think about the Commons consistent with their own organizational missions: “interdomain” perspectives can have multiple contexts. This line of thinking is a key contribution the INSS presents for the Interagency community to explore.

The investigation of many things “inter-” (interaction, interdependency, interrelationships, “interdomain”, etc.,) compose a major part of SENDS research. Interdomain, interagency thinking is a significant area that SENDS offers to synergize with the approach it takes in the development of the Science of Cyberspace. Redden and Hughes do a fine job teasing out the important insights about the environments of the “interdomain” to think about here, but it is at least as important to think about non-military perspectives as it is the military roles.

We would like to discuss more of the role an “Ambassador of Cyberspace” might play in shaping a fuller articulation of a national strategy for security and prosperity, and will solicit more participation as the SENDS Pilot unfolds. For the time being though, we want to ask readers and followers of SENDS to think about how we as a national entity interact with the rest of the world from a diplomatic standpoint.

How would the “US Ambassador to Cyberspace” interact with others, state and non-state, and what would they seek in representing the nation? As the Wired piece points out, dealing with non-states requires a different type of “diplomacy” than what we have practiced in state-to-state interrelationships.

Those of us taking on the work of developing a Science of Cyberspace appreciate the important assertions and questions raised by the Wired Magazine article and the INSS essay. As we have suggested in other presentations on SENDS, we may find insights from the way business and non-governmental organizations interact with both states and non-states, but that is only a proposal for the first “Ambassador to Cyberspace” to explore.

Several of the SENDS advisors worked on a project a few years ago that produced a concept we called the “CyberDIME” which we'll talk more about in future blogs as part of the challenge the Wired Magazine article poses. This notion suggests diminishing the role that the military takes in “interdomain” and “international” interrelationships, which while not the focus of the INSS paper, must be considered in the age of massive interconnectivity. SENDS also offers to open the forum for this discussion, as well.

The Social Network: Art Imitating Life Imitating Art

By Carl Hunt

Last night I invested a couple of hours watching the recently released movie The Social Network, the story about the origins of Facebook as developed by its main celebrity, Mark Zuckerberg. It was a good investment of time, both for the distraction well-produced movies offer in general and for the insights it revealed about life in cyberspace.

Since a big part of SENDS is about better understanding, exploring and exploiting life in the interactive connectivity of cyberspace, it seemed worthwhile to experience the birth of an apparently successful social networking environment in a visually entertaining way. And, I wanted to see how better understanding the past helps to design the future.

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve seen numerous references to emergence and the quest to better understand it before, during and after its manifestations. Emergence is life in action, and science, art and design are important parts of the way in which we will be able to better predict it. Science explains, art visualizes and design blends in harmonious and novel ways.

There have been many attempts to explain why Facebook has achieved its success. The NY Times, for example, has numerous stories in the last few weeks about Facebook, the new movie and even Zuckerberg himself. NY Times columnist Robert Wright wrote his own analysis of the successes of Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg in yesterday’s online column called “Zuckerberg: Non-Evil Non-Genius?” in which he hypothesized that Facebook successes were based primarily in “being in the right place and the right time,” and benefitting from a well-known phenomenon called positive network externalities (a concept Wright explains in the same column so I won’t repeat it here). I will defer the questions about Facebook’s designers gaining success through unethical behavior to others.

Certainly, one can begin to explain these successes in terms like Mr. Wright’s, but there’s more to it than that. Based on the models presented in other blogs in this series (here, here and visually here), we may also consider explaining the successes of the Facebooks, the Microsoft Windows, the VHSs and similar stories in terms of emergence, enhanced by the environment of cyberspace and the massive connectivity it offers. In the case of VHS versus Beta, this should tell you that cyberspace has really been around for some time, even if more massive interactive forms of connectivity have not!

If the artistry in the movie captured the emergence of the “life” of Facebook (discounting the rise of “intelligent machines” for the time being), it did it because it helped us see how Zuckerberg and other visionaries were able to interact through cyberspace and become more sensitized to what users really wanted in social networking (while confirming that they really did want social networking). They learned through experimentation and experience how to connect people to each other in compelling ways. They designed an environment that not only connected but encouraged the emergence of relationships and sharing of personal information and interests.

Facebook and other social media deserve even more study to learn how people ultimately find what they seek in the connected age. Most seek to explore and exploit the value connectivity offers while some just seek to exploit it (for their own gain all too often). The same principles of exchange and emergence connect them both. It’s hard to make progress in the study of bad connected behavior without understanding all connected behavior, a main focus of SENDS.

In any event, technologies such as Facebook and VHS tapes are outcomes of exchange-driven emergences. Connectivity, in differing forms, enhanced the acceptance of both. Science helps to explain these outcomes but often not until well after the fact. This accounts for why emergence is so tough to predict, particularly when accommodated by the connective fabric of a technological environment like cyberspace.

Harold Morowitz notes that the “role of technology in science is summed up in this statement: steam engines have taught us more about thermodynamics than thermodynamics has taught us about steam engines” (Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything, Oxford, NY, 2002). Sometimes, you just have to build the steam engine, VHS tapes or Facebook to serve as your laboratory to see the emergence after it occurs. In fact, technology is often a manifestation of art and science converging (with design in mind one hopes).

In SENDS of course, we also think you should be able to see glimpses of these emergences in models and simulations, but there are limits to life imitating art. It would be really tough to build a simulation the scale of Facebook and get it right without a lot of experimentation.

Indeed, there are limitations to everything and for that reason we need both the arts and the sciences (and the technologies their interactions emerge). And, as noted elsewhere in these blogs, we must hope they work together in elegant design, to understand life as humans really live it. The movie The Social Network gives us a good example of that: Art Imitating Life Imitating Art.

The Importance of Modeling – SENDSim, Part 2

By Greg Amis & Carl Hunt

From the beginnings of the SENDS Project and well before, you’ve heard it time and again: cybersecurity experts face a daunting mix of ever-changing threats and a technological landscape that grows in complexity every day. Preparing a robust plan for network defense requires not just a detailed understanding of information technology but a careful appreciation of how the actions and inactions of ordinary users can enhance or compromise security. In fact, people and how we represent them in planning and design are fundamental inputs of the Design process, as discussed in the 30 September blog, “Design and the Science of Cyberspace.”

Experience has shown that security plans may on the surface seem robust but can be circumvented by users in their quest to accomplish work tasks. Other plans may meet security and information assurance goals but inadvertently prevent legitimate operations from running effectively. Further, even the best plans and designs cannot be executed unless security experts can motivate institutional leaders and decision makers to appreciate the real threats against cybersecurity in an environment of increasingly tight budgets and conflicting priorities.

Fortunately, these are all issues that can be examined in considerable detail in an experimental environment that does not cause disruption in current plans and workforce policies. This experimentation, based on sound scientific principles within a controlled environment, falls within a technique known as agent-based modeling and simulation.

As we first introduced in the 13 September blog entry, “The Importance of Modeling – SENDSim, Part 1,” a major component of the SENDS Pilot Project is a modeling and simulation task that helps us better understand how people and information technology interact and the interdependencies that arise with the convergence of these two sources of vulnerability. We call the product output of this task SENDSim.

We are writing today about the technical nature of this task. As we get further along in the work, we will be able to describe the individual and organizational social nature of this critical component of SENDS.

In brief, SENDSim is being designed to help the cybersecurity expert face cyberspace security challenges by providing a platform for understanding threats, evaluating solutions, and communicating the benefits of a principled security plan to non-technical decision makers. Users can specify network designs, assumptions, and policy parameters. SENDSim then creates a simulated network, a simulated workforce using that network, and a simulated malware threat. The illustration of an early SENDSim screenshot below helps to visualize the components and interactions of SENDSim agent-actors (click to enlarge).

Incorporating modeling techniques from epidemiology and behavioral economics, SENDSim captures both the behaviors of the malware and the behaviors of the network users. These behaviors (based on intents and attitudes modeled on subject matter expert insights) include users’ appreciation of cyber threats, their level of technical sophistication, and their actions, such as choosing passwords, enabling and disabling features, and telling co-workers about threats and solutions.

Detailed visualizations demonstrate how malware infiltrates a network, spreads, and inflicts damage. In addition to standard cybersecurity metrics focused on technology, SENDSim adds metrics related to the workforce, such as productivity, as well as metrics related to cost.

By modeling both the behavior of malware and the behavior of non-malicious users, cybersecurity operators and experts will have a broader view of how their designs and policies impact both their security goals and the larger productivity and efficacy goals of the organization.

Cybersecurity experts are often charged with assessing the vulnerabilities of a network and recommending a course of action. SENDSim can also assist these experts make cyber threats more tangible for decision makers, helping them visualize possible threat scenarios and quantify those scenarios in terms of financial cost as well as in terms of information assurance and military readiness. Decision makers can then draw more informed conclusions that take the broader interests of the organization into account.

We are excited at the prospect SENDSim and potential follow-on modeling and simulation efforts might provide to both the near-term requirements of government and other users, as well as the likely ability to improve design over the lifespan of networks. The design functions required to implement any outputs from our Science of Cyberspace work will benefit greatly from these kinds of modeling and simulation efforts, helping us to test hypotheses and evidence gathered and generated in this endeavor.

Stay tuned for more about SENDSim and the modeling and simulation support to SENDS!

Design and the Science of Cyberspace

By Carl Hunt

During the earlier part of this week, I had the distinct pleasure of attending the Highlands Forum (HF) meeting at Newport, RI. This was HF 42, which followers of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy know this should have been a most illuminating session for the organizers and sponsors of this group (if you don’t, you have only to look it up on Wikipedia to be illuminated yourself!). Rather than repeat the background on the HF and its associate organization, the Highlands Group, you can find out more at: http://highlandsgroup.net/about.php?ID=1, and I will get on with telling you about Design and the Science of Cyberspace.

The HF brings together speakers of diverse disciplines to transport ideas from the edge (and there are many edges!) to the core (DoD’s central repository of current problems, doctrines and operational pursuits: my definition, by the way). The current theme for the HF’s discussions is about shaping how “beliefs, behaviors and outcomes takes place in a massively interconnected world” (from the Agenda for HF42). If you’ve seen a SENDS briefing or read the SENDS Science of Cyberspace White Paper (available in the SENDS Substrate), you have come across that term, “massively interconnected world” more than a few times. This is a marvelous and central challenge for our nation in the age of cyberspace.

As we learned in HF42 this week, however, it’s probably best not to rely solely on the principles of pure emergence (see the 9 and 10 September discussion on emergence and exchange) to spit out “solutions” to these challenges. Rather, we should consider the contributions that principles of Design can make to a sustained progress within this new world. HF42 colleague Bruce Mau (http://www.brucemaudesign.com/) continuously challenged the participants throughout the 3-day meeting to think about how we can apply design principles to security as a “national experience.”

According to Bruce, the current problems we face in conflict and international relationships have changed what it is and what it means to have an American “national experience.” To recapture (or perhaps recreate?) an American way of life will require thoughtful design that accommodates the massive interconnectivity the HF and others are studying and assessing. The creation or adaptation of a Science of Cyberspace also requires this level of thinking in terms of Design.

In fact, we should be thinking about creating the conditions for Design and Emergence to coevolve, if you will, so that we aren’t completely surprised at the outcomes. Designs are probably akin to military planning in that no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. But the process of planning, and designing I’m sure, brings about context for the coevolutionary (ecological, if you will) consideration of problems and solutions in ways that force us to think through relationships and interdependencies that better prepare us for the unknown future.

After this week, I’m quite certain we need to think through the design of the Science of Cyberspace and SENDS, and I will be scrambling to address it! It is my sincere hope that Bruce and others in HF42 will join this pursuit of design within the Science of Cyberspace and help us get it right, not only for America but for everyone. More on Design to come…