Lecture 21: Security
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Introduction
Redefining Security: A
Report to the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence prepared in 1994 by the
US Joint Security Commission. Here is a brief but significant excerpt: "The world has changed dramatically during
the last few years, with profound implications for our society, our government, and the Defense and Intelligence Communities.
Our understanding of the range of issues that impact national security is evolving. Economic and environmental issues are
of increasing concern and compete with traditional political and military issues for resources and attention. Technologies,
from those used to create nuclear weapons to those that interconnect our computers, are proliferating. The implications
and impacts of these technologies must be assessed. There is wide recognition that the security policies, practices, and
procedures developed during the Cold War must be changed. Even without the end of the Cold War, it is clear that our
security system has reached unacceptable levels of inefficiency, inequity, and cost. This nation must develop a new
security system that can meet the emerging challenges we face in the last years of this century and the first years of
the next." interview with Phil Zimmermann, the
author of PGP. Read also the interview with Peter G Neumann, who
is principal scientist at SRI International Computer Science Laboratory, and whose research involves "security, crypto
applications, overall system survivability, reliability, fault tolerance, safety, software-engineering methodology,
systems in the large, applications of formal methods, and risk avoidance."
Both interviews appeared on
High Tech Today. Look at the
interesting list of other guests. Red Team versus the Agents,
an article which appeared in the December issue of Scientific American, and in which the authors describe the new agent-protected system
technology. Such technology is based on special programs, called agents, which "are designed to act as artificial
organisms. Their code is arranged into 'genes,' and the agents adapt in response to stimuli and communicate with one another to identify
suspicious activity, such as unusual network traffic and unauthorized probes. As a result, the agents can detect and foil many kinds of
insider attacks by bought or blackmailed operatives."
Cliff Stoll. The Cuckoo's Egg
Topics
Strategic Assessment: The Internet, a
review of "the actual and potential impact of the Internet on domestic and foreign politics and international conflict,
from the point of view of a US Department of Defense analyst." This publication is part of the Federation
of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy. As you may already know, the governments of the
US, UK, Australia, and likely other countries, have invested a lot of resources in the continuous monitoring of the
Internet traffic for evidence of hostile military action, industrial espionage, drug trafficking and social unrest.
Although, given the obviously high sensitivity of these activities, it is difficult to gather hard evidence of their
existence, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence. See, for example, the US Defense Security Service document
Internet:
The Fastest Growing Modus Operandi for Unsolicited Collection, which includes "a list of
suspicious indicators of foreign collection efforts via computer elicitation." The FBI, in particular, has been
directly involved in many contracts between the US and foreign telecommunications companies. Read the FCC's Order and Authorization
in the matter of TMI's application for "authorization to operate up to 100,000 mobile satellite earth
terminals...through Canadian-licensed satellite MSAT-1" in the US (especially Section "D. National Security and
Law Enforcement Issues").
The Quantum Computer, a
very nice introduction by Jacob West, or check the Quantum computer
entri in Wikipedia. "The advantage of quantum computers arises from the way they encode a bit, the fundamental unit of information.
The state of a bit in a classical digital computer is specified by one number, 0 or 1. An n-bit binary word in a typical
computer is accordingly described by a string of n zeros and ones. A quantum bit, called a qubit, might
be represented by an atom in one of two different states, which can also be denoted as 0 or 1. Two qubits, like two
classical bits, can attain four different well-defined states (0 and 0, 0 and 1, 1 and 0, or 1 and 1). But unlike classical
bits, qubits can exist simultaneously as 0 and 1," with certain probabilities. "A quantum computer promises to be
immensely powerful because it can be in multiple states at once--a phenomenon called superposition--and because it can
act on all its possible states simultaneously. Thus, a quantum computer could naturally perform myriad operations in
parallel, using only a single processing unit." Without entering in the rather complicated details, it is further
possible to show that quantum computers can encrypt data in a completely crack-proof fashion. Preliminary experiments
have demonstrated this capability, but we are still a rather long way from commercially viable hardware. Global Security Survey: Virus Attack, suggests
that viruses may be the top security problem for IT managers. A more recent article by Bernard Cole, Security, Reliability Twin Concerns in Net Era, appeared
in where the author reiterates that "the one problem that continues to hound the Internet and World Wide Web, and indeed, has
gotten worse as the bandwidth available to the average consumer has gone up, is that of viruses." At the same time,
it's important to note, the push towards mobile equipment and information appliances has worsened the situation. The
defenses possible even on desktop machines, thanks to their processing power and large amounts of memory, are difficult
to implement on the smaller information devices, where "the problem of viruses becomes a much more complex one because
of the significant difference between the memory space required for a typical virus and the software mechanisms to protect
against it. The viruses that have become ubiquitous in the desktop seldom exceed a couple of hundred bytes or kilobytes
at most, and, as such, could easily infect even the smallest connected device.," according to Carey Nachenberg,
chief researcher at the Symantec Antivirus Research Center, as quoted in the above article. Among the many proposed
solutions, Cole mentions those by IBM and Symantec.
"Developed by IBM Corp. (Armonk, N.Y.) and licensed for
commercialization by Symantec, the Immune System for Cyberspace uses a specialized server that acts as a petri dish for
the growth and analysis of suspect files sent to it over the network. It then identifies the virus, develops an antidote
and sends it back out on the network just hours after it has been found."
Using a somewhat related technology,
"Symantec will take a two-step strategy. First, he said, will be to deploy the solution to large corporations and
organizations, creating 'islands of safety' within their closed intranet and virtual private network environments...After
that, in a 'head them off at the pass' strategy, Symantec will lobby the 10,000 or so largest Internet service providers.
'By monitoring the sites through which the majority of Internet traffic flows, we think it will be possible to catch most
viruses, identify them and deploy an antidote long before they get to their destination,' Nachenberg said. 'Moreover, we
should be able to do it on the same time scale that they are able to move around the Internet, in hours instead of
days.'"
Questions and Exercises
Last Modification Date: 07 July 2008