GENEVA: When Red Cross staff work in conflict zones, their distinctive red markings signal that they and those they are helping should not be targeted.
Now, as war and attacks increasingly move into cyberspace, the organization wants to create a digital signature that will alert attackers that they have broken into Red Cross computer systems or medical facilities.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Thursday called on countries to support the idea, saying such a digital signature would help protect humanitarian bases from being mistakenly targeted.
“As societies go digital, cyber operations are becoming a reality of armed conflict,” ICRC Director General Robert Mardini said in a statement.
“Digital Sign” is a concrete step to protect essential medical infrastructure and the ICRC in the digital realm.”
For more than 150 years, the organization’s distinctive symbols – the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and more recently the Red Crystal – have conveyed the message in times of conflict that the people, facilities and objects they symbolize are protected by international law. are protected under and are to be attacked. a war crime.
Potential for misuse?
But till date there are no such signals in the cyber world.
The ICRC has been mulling the idea for some time, launching a project in 2020 to assess the technical feasibility of creating a digital signature, and to test the benefits of such a system against the potential for misuse. Initiating consultation for
Concerns have been raised that such a mark could risk identifying a set of “soft targets” for malicious actors, making it easier to systematically target them.
Malicious actors can also misuse digital signatures to misidentify their works as having protected status under international law.
But on Thursday, the ICRC released a new report titled “Digitalizing the Red Cross, Red Crescent and Red Crystal Symbols,” which concluded that the benefits outweigh the risks.
In the foreword, Mardini emphasized that cyber-attacks on medical facilities and humanitarian aid can have dramatic, and deadly, real-life consequences.
He pointed to the increasing number of cyber-attacks on hospitals since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which have “disrupted life-saving treatment for patients and left doctors and nurses with pen and paper at a time like this.” forced to resort when their urgent work was required. most.”
‘mass shock’
And the ICRC itself suffered a massive cyber-attack last January, in which hackers seized data on more than half a million vulnerable people, including some fleeing conflicts, detainees and unaccompanied refugees. were also included.
Balthasar Stehlein, the ICRC’s director of digital transformation and data, told a recent conference in Geneva that the attack was “really a big shock for our institution.”
Stressing that his organization had long been focused on data protection, Mardini said that “the data breach highlighted the urgency of our work in this area.”
“Protecting personal data, and ensuring the availability and integrity of our data and systems in the digital space, is essential to helping and protecting people in the real world,” he added.
In January’s case, hackers targeted an external company in Switzerland that the ICRC contracts to store data, and it remains unclear whether the organization was targeted intentionally.
ICRC legal adviser Tilman Rodenhauser said at a ceremony to release the report on Thursday that, if unintentional, if there was a mark in history it would have been protected under international law, preventing the attack.
Such a mark would provide “an additional layer of protection,” he said, stressing that it would “signal to professional cyber operators that they need to stay out according to the law and ethical standards.”
The ICRC said it is working with a number of universities and others to develop possible technical solutions for the digital sign.
He pointed to several possible approaches, including embedding the emblem in a domain name (eg www.hospital.emblem), or embedding it in an IP address, with a specific sequence of numbers that constitute a protected digital asset.
The organization emphasized that to make the digital symbol a reality, countries need to agree on its use and incorporate it into international humanitarian law, alongside the three physical symbols currently in use.