Chang Ren-Wei, Adjunct Fellow at the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology (DSET), attended the Digital Resilience Forum on 25 March as a DSET representative. During the forum, he examined cyberattack cases from Ukraine, compared them with Taiwan’s situation, and offered policy recommendations for Taiwan. Held under the theme “Submarine Cables and Network Infrastructure Under Geopolitical Pressure,” the forum brought together technical experts, civil society, and academia to discuss how Taiwan can strengthen digital resilience and implement effective risk management in the face of both natural disasters and deliberate sabotage.

The Digital Resilience Forum is a platform developed through community-driven initiatives led by the Cyber Resilience Co-lab (CRC), g0v.tw, and the Open Culture Foundation, among others. The forum was moderated by Lee Mei-Chun, Assistant Research Fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Ethnology and co-founder of CRC, together with Singing Li, CEO of the Open Culture Foundation.

DSET spoke during the second half of the forum, alongside other panelists including Dr. Tu Chen-Yi, Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research’s Division of Cyber Security and Decision-Making Simulation, a representative from the Ministry of Digital Affairs’ Department of Infrastructure Resilience, and Ronny Wang, founder of OpenUp.

In his remarks, Chang Ren-Wei analyzed cyberattack cases from the war in Ukraine and stressed that digital resilience is not something improvised only after a crisis erupts. Rather, it is built on both the structure of a country’s network infrastructure before war and its ability to mobilize resources rapidly during wartime.

Chang noted that, even before the war, Ukraine already had a more diversified fixed broadband market, direct cross-border physical interconnections with neighboring EU countries, and 14 Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) distributed across seven cities. During wartime, it further sustained critical communications services through a combination of national roaming, cross-border roaming arrangements, satellite bridging, emergency spectrum measures, backup power, and continuous repair efforts. While the former reflects Ukraine’s unique historical circumstances, the latter offers an important set of combined measures from which Taiwan should actively learn.

He also cautioned that although Starlink is often highlighted as important, it is not a single solution that can function independently of existing infrastructure conditions. For Taiwan, it remains necessary to clarify and establish a national network architecture that is multi-layered, multi-vendor, and capable of graded dispatch and prioritization. This also echoes issues raised by experts in the first half of the forum, including cross-operator coordination and the need to assess risks related to routing sovereignty and domain governance.

Given that 99% of Taiwan’s international communications rely on submarine cables, and that the number of cable landing stations is limited, Chang emphasized that if only backup options remain for external connectivity, several core questions must be clarified in advance: which essential traffic must be prioritized, which services may fail if rerouted overseas, and whether data centers and the control plane of critical services can continue to operate independently within Taiwan.

He further stressed that governance issues involving communications protocols such as DNS and BGP ultimately require international cooperation. Mechanisms between Taiwan and its partners for incident reporting, digital forensics collaboration, and offshore backup capacity still need to be further institutionalized and made more transparent.

In closing, Chang argued that Taiwan’s next stage of preparation should place “continuity of operations” at the center of digital resilience governance. This means not only expanding backup capacity, but also integrating continuity frameworks across central and local governments, ensuring sufficient backup power for critical nodes such as data centers and base stations, and moving exercises beyond single-point failures toward compound, multi-point disruption scenarios, such as simultaneously simulating cable cuts, power outages, DDoS attacks, and wiper malware. Only through these kinds of cross-sector, cross-operator, operationally realistic exercises, he said, can Taiwan truly translate international lessons into locally actionable digital resilience strategies.

Notes: 

  • Internet Exchange Points (IXPs): The physical locations where different networks connect to share traffic.
  • Control Plane: The core management system that directs and coordinates network traffic and services, acting as the ‘brain’ of the digital infrastructure.
  • DNS: The internet’s phonebook that translates domain names in URL into IP addresses.
  • BGP: The internet’s GPS that determines the routing paths for data across different networks and countries.