• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
• /
• v.28 no.4
• /
• pp.905-917
• /
• 2018

The sovereign state has the right to engage in self-defense or war with the approval of the Security Council when it receives an invasion of territory from a foreign country. War is conducted under the principle of the necessity and proportionality of self-defense. In case of cyber attack, proportional countermeasure must be made through attack means and effect analysis, and cyber weapons need to be classified for this purpose. Therefore, this study aims to provide a rational and legitimate response according to the necessity and proportionality of the self - defense right by suggesting definition and classification criteria of cyber weapons. In this study, cyber weapons were defined as "means of collecting, attacking, and protecting information using cyber technology in the cyber space according to military objectives. Based on existing weapon systems and public cyber weapons cases, cyber weapons were classified as (1) cyber weapons for information gathering, (2) cyber weapons for attack, and (3) cyber weapons for protection. We suggest the considerations for applying the proportional response according to this functional classification. In order to guarantee the principle of proportionality to cyber attacks in the future, the classification study based on the cyber weapon effect should be conducted. This study has conducted an exploratory study on the classification of cyber clusters which constitutes one axis of the proportionality principle.