Dr. Thomas Reinhold has been awarded the IANUS Prize 2024 for his dissertation, which was supervised by Prof. Dr. Dr. Christian Reuter and completed in 2023. The award ceremony took place on December 11, 2024 in Darmstadt.
Cyberspace and its global infrastructures are becoming an area of intelligence and military operations, as evidenced by the creation of military cyber divisions and the integration of cyberspace into the security and defense strategies of states. Many traditional instruments of transparency, de-escalation and arms control do not work due to the technical characteristics of cyberspace. The dissertation ‘Towards a Peaceful Development of Cyberspace – Challenges and Technical Measures for the De-escalation of State-led Cyberconflicts and Arms Control of Cyberweapons’ by Thomas Reinhold deals with the question of how measures for the de-escalation of state-led conflicts in cyberspace and for arms control of cyberweapons can be developed. To this end, the dissertation takes a specifically technical perspective on these problems and the underlying political challenges of state behavior and international humanitarian law in cyberspace in order to identify starting points for technical measures of transparency, arms control and verification. Based on the approach of adopting existing technical measures from other areas of computer science, the dissertation provides proof-of-concept approaches for some of the challenges mentioned. This includes a classification system for cyber weapons based on technically measurable characteristics in order to define and delimit the concept of a weapon as an essential prerequisite for their regulation in cyberspace. Furthermore, a procedure for the mutual reduction of vulnerability stockpiles between state actors as a transparency and arms control measure is presented, as well as an approach for plausibly assuring the non-involvement of a state actor in a cyber conflict as a measure of de-escalation. The dissertation thus also provides impulses on the responsibility and design possibilities of computer science with regard to the peaceful development and use of cyberspace.
Every year, the IANUS Prize honors outstanding theses from all disciplines at TU Darmstadt. IANUS stands for scientific and technical peace and conflict research at the Technical University of Darmstadt.
