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Entropic security information, materiality, and cybersecurity

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Version 2 2024-03-02, 09:22
Version 1 2023-06-09, 22:40
thesis
posted on 2024-03-02, 09:22 authored by Noran Fouad

This thesis advances a novel interdisciplinary exploration of cybersecurity. To date, one of the principal ways the field of cybersecurity has been theorised is through securitization theory. Cybersecurity is therefore identified by the Copenhagen School as a significant new security sector governed by the wider logics of existential threats, exceptionality, and emergency measures. This thesis, however, argues that cybersecurity actually differs from many other security sectors because of the peculiar ontological nature of ‘information’ that sits at the heart of this burgeoning field. Building upon recent scholarship on the philosophy of information, information sciences, and software studies, this thesis argues that three aspects of information are particularly significant for shaping, enabling, and producing the field of cybersecurity: (1) the intrinsic indeterminacies surrounding informational operations; (2) the non[1]anthropocentric agential capacities of codes/software; and (3) the simultaneous physicality and non-physicality of information. Through a detailed analysis of cybersecurity discourses in the United States of America (2003-16), the thesis thus goes on to show how these peculiar ontological characteristics of information generate security logics that are quite different from conventional accounts of securitization, and which are better captured through notions of negentropy, emergence, and noise. This ultimately culminates, the thesis argues, in a revised understanding of cybersecurity as entropic security.

History

File Version

  • Published version

Pages

222

Department affiliated with

  • International Relations Theses

Qualification level

  • doctoral

Qualification name

  • phd

Language

  • eng

Institution

University of Sussex

Full text available

  • Yes

Supervisor

Prof. Stefan Elbe and Dr. Stefanie Ortmann

Legacy Posted Date

2021-01-21

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