Enabling Distributed Security in Cyberspace: Building a Healthy and Resilient Cyber Ecosystem with Automated Collective Action

This paper explores the idea of a United States under which cyber devices collaborate in near-real time in their own defense. This idea, which encompasses what the Department of Homeland Security considers a “healthy cyber ecosystem”, calls for a world where cyber devices have innate capabilities that enable them to work together to anticipate and prevent cyber attacks. The devices of this “healthy cyber ecosystem” would also be capable of limiting the spread of attacks across participating devices and minimizing the consequences of attacks while recovering the device to a “trusted state”. There are three building blocks identified in the paper that would best contribute to a health cyber ecosystem; these three identified building blocks are “automation, interoperability, and authentication”. The paper outlines the ways in which these three aspects of cyber security would be able to contribute to ecosystem maturity while outlining possible ways of incentivizing the creation of such a system. The paper works as a means to provoke discussion about what we can do to advance the capabilities that can be achieved in the near future by utilizing “standards-based software” and strengthen self-defense through automated collective action.