Speaker:
Dr. Chris C. Demchak
US Naval War College

Abstract: The complexities of and losses from a shoddily created cyberspace substrate continue to hollow the economies and national power of consolidated democracies.  As China rises as a strategically focused and digitally aggressive authoritarian giant, it is critical that democratic leaders both understand the reality they face and how an institutional alternative may be created to avoid being weak cyber powers in the future. This presentation offers two models: the ‘Cybered Conflict’ model to lay the foundation explanation for the weakness in national cyber power of democracies, and the ‘Cyber Operational Resilience Alliance (CORA) model to explain how this existentially threatening trend may be turned around through allied action to jointly ensure cyber resilience. Finally the talk will outline very briefly how the CORA model may be used analytically to improve the cyber resilience alliance potential of national cyber strategies, and to identify organizations capable of contributing to more robust collective cyber defenses across sectors and allied democratic nations.

About: With engineering, economics, and comparative complex organization theory/political science degrees, Dr. Chris C. Demchak is the RDML Grace M. Hopper Professor of Cyber Security and a member of the Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute, U.S. Naval War College. In her research on cyberspace as a globally shared insecure complex ‘substrate’, Demchak takes a systemic approach to emergent structures, comparative institutional evolution, adversaries’ use of systemic cybered tools, virtual worlds/gaming for operationalized organizational learning, and designing systemic resilience against imposed surprise.

The weekly security seminar has been held every semester since spring of 1992. We invite personnel at Purdue and visitors from outside to present on topics of particular interest to them in the areas of computer and network security, computer crime investigation, information warfare, information ethics, public policy for computing and security, the computing "underground," and other related topics. More info