Emerging Cyber Security Challenges: Implications for Iranian National Security

Abstract

In the third decade of 21st century, cyber security has become a completely developed national security paradigm like other prominent security paradigms such as physical security, economic security, and food security. Unmatched pace of technological advancements in the fields of Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence, automation, and communication services have transformed key processes of governance, commerce, and trade from physical to cyber space. As human dependence on cyber technologies increased new questions about the prevailing security models has come to the fore during the same time. Concepts like network security, data security or infrastructure security are no longer isolated domains but have transformed as securitization of cyber domain has become an ongoing global phenomenon.  This paper focuses on how this transformation of geopolitical conflicts, from physical to cyber arena, is taking place where traditional concepts of conventional war are changing. It also examines how cyber security threat matrix is diametrically different from all prevailing military doctrinal construct? These questions certainly demand a new theoretical framework that can put this rapidly emerging new security paradigm. This study attempts to address this important question as well while taking the international and regional developments with special focus on the emerging cyber security domain in Iran.