An Authentic Digital EMblem (ADEM)

Introduction

The emblems of the red cross, red crescent, and the red crystal are used to mark hospitals, vehicles, and other facilities of humanitarian organizations. In times of war, international humanitarian law mandates armed parties to cease attacks on marked entities. By its nature, these markings are visual and intended to be seen by humans, aiming to prevent physical attacks.

Yet, humanitarian organizations increasingly rely on digital infrastructure to conduct their operations. Digital infrastructure is like its physical counterpart susceptible to attacks. In this context, though, the protective symbols of the red cross, crescent and crystal are not applicable. Together with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), we developed a scheme for a digital emblem that fills this gap: ADEM. ADEM combines many critical and desirable properties. ADEM allows for the active distribution of emblems such that one never has to ask for them. ADEM is a distributed system to cope with the realities of international diplomacy where consensus is notoriously hard to reach. ADEM is backwards compatible and does not require changes to the Internet's infrastructure. ADEM was presented on the external pageICRC's Law & Policy Blogcall_made.

Work on ADEM is ongoing. We plan to enter a testing and implementation phase supported by the ICRC in June/July. The ICRC will publish a report on their work towards a digital emblem later this year. This report proposes the idea of a digital emblem to an international audience and includes a chapter on ADEM. Our ultimate goal is to have ADEM become the international standard to distribute digital emblems.

This project is part of the Centre for Cyber Trust, a joint effort of the Information Security, Programming Methodology, and Network Security Group at ETH Zurich, as well as the Usable Security and Privacy Group at University of Bonn.

Publications

F. Linker, D.Basin
ADEM: An Authentic Digital EMblem
In: 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2023)
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