Situation awareness and control errors of cyber weapons

摘要

Cyber weapons are becoming autonomous intelligent agents with considerable autonomy and planning ability. The examples of this kind of weapons already exist and have been used. This makes situation awareness a key factor of safety of cyber weapons. There are risks of wrong behavior of such weapons caused by the following two factors: misunderstanding of commands, misinterpretation of situation. The present paper analyses some known cases of misbehavior of cyber weapons and predicts the future threats of this kind. The more intelligent software becomes the more difficult will be to control it. When designing and developing new cyber weapons, one has to pay special attention to supporting situation awareness of the weapons and keeping appropriate control over the weapons under any circumstances.