editor’s letter
ONE CAN GET a good picture of what is “hot” in technol- ogy by attending a Tech Summit. Such events are now held regularly in places
trying to compete with Silicon Valley. I
attended such a summit a few weeks
ago. So what’s hot? FinTech (financial
technology), MedTech (medical tech-
nology), Io T (Internet of Things), and
autonomous cars are all hot. These
areas attract a high level of venture cap-
ital, and one can expect them to grow
and reshape the financial, medical,
and transportation industries. Under-
lying these technologies is, of course,
the Internet—our “network of insecu-
rity”—so we can expect cyber insecu-
rity to spread across more and more
aspects of our lives.
Cyber insecurity seems to be the
normal state of affairs these days. In
June 2015, the U.S. Office of Personnel
Management announced it had been
the target of a data breach targeting
the records of as many as 18 million
people. In late 2016, we learned about
two data breaches at Yahoo! Inc.,
which compromised over one billion
accounts. Lastly, during 2016, close
to 20,000 email messages from the
U.S. Democratic National Committee
were leaked via WikiLeaks. U.S. intelligence agencies argued that the Russian government directed the breaches in an attempt to interfere with the
U.S. election process. Furthermore,
cyber insecurity goes way beyond data
breaches. In October 2016, for example, emergency centers in at least 12
U.S. states had been hit by a deluge of
fake emergency calls. What cyber disaster is going to happen next?
So here we are, 70 years into the
computer age and after three ACM
Turing Awards in the area of cryptog-
raphy (but none in cybersecurity), and
we still do not seem to know how to
build secure information systems.
This state of affairs was bemoaned
in 2005 by then ACM President David
Patterson, who argued (https://goo.
gl/9QbuZc), “We must protect the security and privacy of computer and
communication users from criminals
and terrorists while preventing the Or-wellian vision of Big Brother.” Yet here
we are, over a decade later, and Patterson’s passionate appeal is as relevant
as ever! That is not to say we have
not made significant progress in the
development of security-enhancing
techniques, but we have not really succeeded in making information-tech-nology infrastructure more secure.
As information technology permeates
more and more aspects of our lives,
the stakes are getting higher and higher. The risk is no longer merely about
compromised privacy. We must worry
now about the integrity of vital infrastructure components, including the
electrical-power grid, the telecommunication system, the financial system,
and the transportation system. And
yet, our community marches forward
with no special sense of urgency.
The basic problem, I believe, is that
security never gets a high-enough priority. We build a computing system
for certain functionality, and functionality sells. Then we discover security vulnerabilities and fix them, and
security of the system does improve.
Microsoft Windows 10 is much, much
better security-wise than Windows XP.
The question is whether we are eliminating old vulnerabilities faster than
we are creating new ones. Judging
by the number of publicized security
breaches and attacks, the answer to
that question seems to be negative.
This raises some very fundamental questions about our field. Are we
investing enough in cybersecurity research? Has the research yielded solid
scientific foundations as well as useful
solutions? Has industry failed to adopt
these solutions due to cost/benefit?
More fundamentally, how do we change
the trajectory in a fundamental way, so
the cybersecurity derivative goes from
being negative to being positive?
We can draw an analogy to car safety.
Over the past 100 years, the amount of
vehicle miles traveled has been steadily
increasing, but fatalities with respect
to vehicle miles traveled have been decreasing. Car safety has been increasing mostly due to government regulation. For example, the U.S. Congress
established the National Transportation Safety Board in 1926. Why is there
no National Cyber Security Board?
Cyber libertarianism refers to the belief that individuals should be at liberty
to pursue their own tastes and interests
online. Cyber libertarianism is a common attitude in the tech community;
“regulation stifles innovation” is the
prevailing mantra. One could imagine a similar attitude being applied
to the car industry, but history has
shown that regulation and innovation
can co-exist. The tech community has
not been able to address the cybersecurity situation on its own; it is time
to get governments involved, via laws
and regulations. Numerous issues
will have to be debated and resolved,
but we must accept, I believe, that the
cybersecurity problem will not be resolved by the market.
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Moshe Y. Vardi, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Copyright held by author.
Cyber Insecurity and
Cyber Libertarianism
DOI: 10.1145/3073731 Moshe Y. Vardi