In May 2019, during CyCon, the Estonian president described the Estonian view on cyber collective countermeasures. Since then, reflecting their unsettled status in customary international law, collective countermeasures have been a subject of increasing discussion. Support for collective countermeasures, particularly in the cyber domain, may be justified in the light of their increasing use during the last twenty years, stemming, among other things, from States’ reactions to Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Network security is the backbone of any complex application and the focus of this session. The session covers topics ranging from Personal Area Networks (PANs) to Wide Area Networks (WANs), covering for the latter, consumer device Bluetooth, secure use of 5G, and securing WANs over public ISPs.

The outbreak of the Ukraine-Russia war in 2022 led to an outpouring of support from governments and industry. Time was of the essence, and overcoming institutional inertia and coordination between donors and recipients was key to ensuring expediency of delivery. This panel discusses how governments spearheaded initiatives such as the Tallinn Mechanism and the IT Coalition for civil and military assistance, the lessons learned from these initiatives, and how these lessons can prepare us for the next crisis response situation.

This session is dedicated to artificial intelligence, principally applications of machine learning and AI methods for solving cyber security problems. Topics include defeating and improving network flow classifiers, firmware vulnerability detection, and risk management methodology for AI systems.

The rapid evolution of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous weapons is reshaping international law. The ongoing integration of AI into weapons systems has the potential to significantly impact decision-making and command responsibility in military operations. This panel will focus on the implications of technological advances across a range of international law disciplines.

Every year, over 30 national cyber commanders from allied and partner nations meet in Tallinn to exchange ideas and discuss the challenges and opportunities they face in building national cyber defence. This session will allow the CyCon audience to meet some of the cyber commanders in a public follow-up to the closed meeting and hear a first-hand account of some of the pressing issues in cyber defence.