Predictions of the future of technology are increasingly starting to sound like science fiction. Depending on your point of view that can be good or bad. As for me, I’m an optimist, and I know we humans will find a way to ensure technology serves our best interests.
But a sad fact of the human condition is that bad people will likely be with us long into the future. And sometimes good people can be tempted to do bad things, so we really need to engineer solutions that keep the bad guys from benefiting from technology and keep those who can sometimes be tempted from giving in to their darker side.
To engineer secure systems for the future we need to continually assess where we are and what the near term future holds for our technologies. Here is a couple short predictions that could be useful in this discussion.
First, a definition: Cyberspace is our interconnected information technology.
- Remote power is here today and will soon be widely distributed. This will allow small power consumption devices (like keyboards, mice, bluetooth headsets, hearing aides, small sensors) to be provided power by RF energy.
- Power generation from motion is almost ready for prime time. This will allow devices to gain energy from vibrations, like the vibrations in a bridge when a car passes over it, or the vibrations in a wall of a building when the wind blows past it, or the vibrations caused by a person’s movement through the day.
- Communication capability (bandwidth) between fixed facilities will increase 1000 fold over the next five years.
- Storage, especially flash storage technologies, is decreasing in price so much we can afford to store data anywhere on almost anything.
- Chips are being designed in ways that actually beat the old Moore’s Law projections. This is being done by placing many cores on one chip. Very high data rate capabilities are being connected directly to the cores on these chips.
- RFID is becoming so widespread we can place devices on everything that allows devices to report back what they are and what they are for and where they have been.
- All these capabilities are being networked together, including increasingly direct device to device connections via capabilities provided by enhanced protocols (especially IPv6).
- Consumer devices, especially consumer communication devices, are becoming increasingly capable. What used to be called a cell phone is now a phone/video recorder/video editor/entertainment/mobile office device with location aware data (GPS).
- Cloud Computing and the rise of web2.0 and web enabled service delivery is a trend as powerful as any force of nature. Increasingly we will get our computational power from the grid.
There are many other elements of the future relevant to security discussions, but the projections above lead to some interesting conclusions on their own. So lets think through some of the impacts of the above.
- Bad actors who want to exploit systems will increasingly not have to worry about them being powered off. They will be on all the time.
- Many paths into devices will be available for unauthorized users to exploit. And if they are compromised by people or code that intend on generating denial of service attacks, huge amounts of bandwidth will exist for them to attack from.
- When a bad actor gets through defenses into data stores, they will likely find a wide range of data to exploit, since it is becoming so easy and low cost for us to store everything.
- Having things networked together means it can be easier to penetrate a target by finding one weak link that is connected to the infrastructure.
- Areas of people’s lives they once thought private, especially their cell phones and the data on their cell phones, are increasingly becoming attractive targets to hackers.
What is needed in an environment like this? I can’t pretend to know all the solutions but here are a few points I support:
- Enhanced firewalls and intrusion detection devices.
- Better configuration control, for all devices. When a device is out of configuration is must be brought back into compliance immediately.
- Better laws and treaties concerning cyberspace.
- Better training and education for all (I mean ALL) humans connected to the grid.
- Better, continuous upgraded anti-virus solutions.
- Enhanced, easier to use encryption.
- Enhanced, more secure identity and authorization technologies.
- More Reading:
- Awake Yet? The list of cyber security wake up calls grows as predicted
- How do you define cyberspace?
- CTO-as-a-Service: When your enterprise needs deep technical expertise on demand
- Cybersecurity and IT standards and standard bodies
- OLPC: The Future Is Changing Again
- Apple: Increasingly an enterprise IT company
- The Future of Cyberspace Security: The Law of The Rodeo
- Deja VVVu: Others Claiming Gartner’s Construct for Big Data
For more on these topics see the CTOvision Guide to National Security Technology and
