Reports & Papers

In the modern era, there is great convergence in the technologies used by friendly nations and by hostile ones. Signals intelligence agencies find themselves penetrating the technologies that they also at times must protect. To ease this tension, the United States and its partners have relied on an approach sometimes called Nobody But Us, or NOBUS: target communications mechanisms using unique methods accessible only to the United States. This paper examines how the NOBUS approach works, its limits, and the challenging matter of what comes next.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008, a powerful surveillance tool that allows U.S. government agencies to spy on foreign persons to collect counter-terrorism intelligence, will expire on December 31, 2017 without Congressional reauthorization. This paper has two goals: to concisely describe how agencies obtain information under Section 702, and to provide guidance to legislators and their staffers by examining the core issues they will confront as they consider reauthorizing this legislation.

Where does malicious software - the code designed to exploit the vulnerabilities of computers and computer systems - come from?

This paper presents a new dataset of more than 4,300 vulnerabilities, and estimates vulnerability rediscovery across different vendors and software types. It concludes that rediscovery happens more than twice as often as the 1-9% range previously reported.

Malicious software is adapted, stolen, bought, and used everyday on a global scale. There are better ways to counter this proliferation than export controls. Policymakers should strengthen incentives for researchers and the private sector to rapidly identify software vulnerabilities, disclose them to developers, patch those vulnerabilities, and adopt those patches. Building on previous debates, this paper makes specific recommendations to shorten the lifecycle of vulnerabilities and improve the short term health of the software security ecosystem.

Few areas of national policymaking will remain untouched by artificial intelligence. Though the challenges it poses are complex, the opportunities it offers are tremendous. Simply put, machine learning is too important to ignore.