Cyberwarfare and the Game of Go

Last Updated on Saturday, 2 August 2008 10:39 Written by Jeffreycarr Monday, 28 July 2008 06:16

When playing Go, resentments clear away. Thought become like the moon arising at night. There, on the beach of the ocean of endless births and deaths the Go stones become uncountable grains of sand. The white and black stones become the colors of day and night , the star-points become the nine lights of heaven, the three hundred and sixty intersections render the numbers of the days of the year. (from the Noh play Go)

The U.S. Air Force released its list of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant topics today. Predictably there were several in the area of cyberwarfare. This is a tough issue, not just for the USAF but for all of the military services as well as the intelligence agencies like the NSA and the Central Security Service who are tasked with the responsibility of protecting our critical information infrastructure, among other duties.

LTG Keith Alexander (US Army) wrote “Warfighting in Cyberspace” for the Joint Forces Quarterly almost one year ago today, and covered the challenges quite well. Here’s an excerpt:

The speed at which the cyberspace domain is evolving and its ever-growing impact on national security make this potentially as critical a period as that faced by Mitchell, Claire Chennault, and their contemporaries as they realized the potential of the air domain and sought to develop airpower doctrine. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of 20 years to develop strategy, tactics, and doctrine to deal with this revolution and maintain U.S. superiority in this rapidly changing environment.

The trends for advances in technology, often (correctly or incorrectly) related to Moore’s Law and derivative theories, such as the Law of Accelerating Returns proposed by Ray Kurzweil in his 2001 essay, dictate that we must move quickly. If one examines the advances in Internet and computer technology in just the last 5 years, it is readily apparent that we could find ourselves behind or even militarily irrelevant in cyberspace.

It struck me this morning that the game of Go offers a paradigm that’s similiar to the distributed network of cloud computing. Most of our nation’s legacy networks (including the Department of Defense) are obvious targets for the cyberwarfare activities of our opponents. By moving strategic networks into the cloud, we can deny our opponents a hard target to focus on. Additionally, by leaving old networks in place as a focus for cyber attacks, we employ the Weiqi strategy of Lure the Tiger down from the Mountain; i.e., don’t fight where your enemy is strong.

It’s clear that innovation is called for when thinking about cyberwarfare. Perhaps considering the strategies of an ancient Chinese board game can inform our future tactics in cyberspace.

See also Unrestricted Warfare, The Chinese Box, and the Game of Go

UPDATE: Here’s an excellent post on some of the security advantages offered by Cloud Computing.