Failing better in the infosphere: ontological uncertainties and the essence of security in cyberspace

Abstract

The operation of digital information systems poses complex challenges for cybersecurity policies and practices. These include the uncertainties associated with vulnerability analysis, intrusion detection, attribution and damage analysis, and the lack of comprehensive technical knowledge about such systems. This article theorises uncertainties as an ontological property of information, which co-produces peculiar conceptualisations of ‘defence’ and ‘security’ in cybersecurity, in contrast to other security fields. Using interdisciplinary insights from the philosophy of information, information theory, and cybernetics, the article conceptualises cybersecurity as an ontologically informational field–i.e., an infosphere–that is essentially constituted, conceptualised, experienced, and managed through ‘information’. It goes on to investigate the characteristics, temporalities, and trajectories of uncertainties in cybersecurity that cannot be reduced to the empirical challenge of ‘not knowing’, and that are intrinsic to the existence of information and the operation of information systems, beyond the ways such uncertainties are tamed or governed by ‘human’ actors. This information-theoretic approach ultimately demonstrates how ontological uncertainties co-produce a specific logic of defence in the infosphere that does not postulate a pre-defined enemy or an attack, and an understanding of security as a moving target, in which progress is defined as ‘failing better’.