The Fourth Leg

Communication Over Escalation by Institute for Security and Technology

Formally Verified by Institute for Security and Technology

In this podcast “Security Through Simplicity,” Eric Grosse joins Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes to detail the trade-offs of prioritizing security, reliability, and efficiency in the CATALINK system. This includes a primer on how a sender and receiver will exchange cryptographic keys to ensure they are communicating securely. The episode also discusses the reasoning for Grosse's proposed technical baseline solutions.

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This week’s episode of The Fourth Leg, “The Mathematics of Trust and Betrayal,” features experienced cryptographer and owner and founder of Anagram Laboratories, Dr. Tom Berson. Dr. Berson joins Tech4GS’ Philip Reiner to discuss how lessons from the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) competition can aid the development of international standards and potentially serve as an example for collaborative, transparent efforts for the creation of the CATALINK system.

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This week’s episode of The Fourth Leg, "Assume Vulnerability", features the High Priest of Coreboot, Ron Minnich. We dive deep into the substance of his paper, “Hardware that is Less Untrusted: Open Source Down to the Silicon” and discuss software, firmware, and hardware vulnerabilities and the value of open source code.

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This week's episode of The Fourth Leg, “Targeting Communications and Escalation,” features the return of one of the “NC3 originals,” Paul Bracken from Yale University. We dive deep into the substance of his paper, “Communication Disruption Attacks on NC3,” which argues that states must do more to delineate intentions in attacking communications systems in order to avoid inadvertent nuclear conflict. Dr. Bracken also shares insight into the beginnings of his career and how he came to work for Herman Kahn for a decade at the Hudson Institute.

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Welcome back to The Fourth Leg, a series of podcasts focused on one of the most complex systems in the world today - nuclear command and control - and its increasingly complicated future.

Here in season two, we will discuss the necessity for a secure, global crisis communications capability.

This is the first episode of our second series, where we discuss the need for a better communication system between nuclear powers with Philip Reiner, Peter Hayes, Eric Grosse, Rear Admiral John Gower, and Subrata Banik.

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In this week's segment, we sat down with Dr. James Acton regarding the paper he wrote for our workshop back in January. Throughout the discussion, James shares with us how he evaluates the risk of inadvertent escalation arising from attacks on dual-use (nuclear and conventional warfare) command, control, communication, and intelligence (C3I) capabilities in a conventional war because such attacks would degrade the target’s nuclear command-and-control system.

We sat down with Dr. Ronald Schouten about a paper he wrote for our workshop back in January. Among other topics, we discussed insider threats to nuclear command, control and communications. The breadth of this topics is enormous, and yet the space for its discussion remains relatively limited.

​In this segment, Bill Boothby observes: “For all States, there is an obligation to take constant care in nuclear operations to spare civilians and civilian objects. More detailed precautionary rules apply to all States with certain additional rules only applying to States that are party to API and that made no nuclear statement. States adopt numerous measures to disseminate this body of law. International engagement seems to be the best approach for promoting international compliance.”