Several indicators point to a crisis at the heart of the emerging area of international cyber security law. First, proposals for binding international treaties by leading stakeholders, including China and Russia, have been met with little enthusiasm by other states, and are generally seen as having limited prospects of success. Second, states are extremely reluctant to commit themselves to specific interpretations of controversial legal questions and thus to express their cyberopinio juris. Third, instead of interpreting or developing rules, state representatives seek refuge in the more ambiguous term ‘norms’. This article argues that the reluctance of states to engage in international law-making has left a power vacuum, lending credence to claims that international law fails in addressing modern challenges posed by rapid technological development. In response, several non-state-driven norm-making initiatives have sought to fill the void, including Microsoft's cyber norms proposals and theTallinn Manualproject. The article then contends that this emerging body of non-binding norms presents states with a critical window of opportunity to reclaim a central law-making position, similar to historical precedents including the development of legal regimes for Antarctica and nuclear safety. Whether the supposed crisis will lead to the demise of inter-state cyberspace governance or a recalibration of legal approaches will thus be decided in the near future. States should assume a central role if they want to ensure that the existing power vacuum is not exploited in a way that would upset their ability to achieve strategic and political goals.

Cyber operations pose a set of novel challenges to the generally conservative body of the law of State responsibility. Central among them is the problem of attribution, which lies at the intersection of technology and law. This article reflects the recent developments in the States' technological capacity to identify the sources of cyber attacks from the perspective of international law. It revisits Article 8 of the International Law Commission's Articles on State Responsibility in order to 'decode' its contents vis-à-vis its drafting history and with an eye on its future application to the conduct in cyberspace. The article argues that there are three autonomous standards of attribution built into that provision: instructions, direction, and control. It then demonstrates the utility and limitations of each of them against the backdrop of actual and hypothetical cyber operations. The article concludes with suggestions for further development of the law in this area, focussing on the missing potential of the law to regulate instigation of wrongful cyber conduct and on the prohibitively strict test of control applicable de lege lata.

This article presents the case for a progressive interpretation of the notion of military objectives in