The November/December issue of Foreign Affairs (unfortunately not yet available online as of this writing) has an eponymous piece by Wesley Clark and Peter Levin: in it, they write that
[The limited success of the July 4 cyberattacks principally affecting the US and Korea] may embolden future hackers to attack critical infrastructure, such as power generators or air-traffic-control systems, with devastating consequences for the U.S. economy and national security…There is no form of military combat more irregular than an electronic attack: it is extremely cheap, is very fast, and can disrupt or deny critical services at the moment of maximum peril…Disturbingly, [other nations] seem to understand the vulnerabilities of the United States’ network infrastructure better than many Americans do…The longer the U.S government waits [to confront the real threats in cybersecurity], the more devastating the eventual assault is likely to be…the consequences of a major breach would be catastrophic.
Clark and Levin recount William Safire‘s claim that a 3-kiloton explosion of a Siberian natural gas pipeline in 1982—”the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space”—was the direct consequence of a Trojan inserted into Canadian SCADA software that the CIA allowed the KGB to steal. They recirculate the rumor that the Israeli destruction of a purported Syrian nuclear facility in 2007 was facilitated by a cyberattack targeting Syrian air defense systems. (This blog has linked to other reports of capabilities along similar lines, such as this one.)
But their real focus is (not surprisingly, given Levin’s history as founder of a hardware outfit specializing in the area) is on the problem of validating hardware. DoD has been very concerned with the idea of hardware Trojans the last few years. Nobody in the military/intelligence-industrial complex wants to take it on faith that chips that are manufactured in China or Taiwan don’t have backdoors. There are apparent precedents for the hardware Trojan such as old reports involving Crypto AG. So NSA started up a trusted foundry and DARPA started the TRUST program (whose PM funded some of my research some years back, so I applaud his taste on both counts). But that leaves the vast majority of chips in network components still unaccounted for, including a large number of counterfeit chips.
Clark and Levin propose an emphasis on reconfigurable hardware (such as FPGAs) and the sort of immunological paradigm started by the Forrest group at UNM as an example of a sound defensive strategy. While the practical utility (as compared to the undeniable conceptual elegance) of the paradigm for network defense is not clear to me (but then again I’m obviously a partisan when it comes to the best scientific principles for designing network defense infrastructure), the ideas of using reconfigurable hardware and avoiding a computational and network monoculture that goes hand-in-hand with immunological principles are sound ones that I’ve agreed with for some time. I gained an appreciation of the benefits of FPGAs from performing research on algorithms for reconfigurable computing architectures some years back, and at a conference last year I got into a brief argument on the security dangers of monocultures with a government sysadmin who lauded the monolithic computing infrastructure he maintained. So it’s not a stretch to say that I am extremely sympathetic to their point of view.
Clark and Levin close by highlighting the need for open infrastructure–both reconfigurable hardware and open source software, and (insofar as it can be implemented) this is the entirely correct approach to technological security of any form. As Reagan said: “trust, but verify”.
update 10/23: The article is available here (subscription required).
Securing the Information Highway
The November/December issue of Foreign Affairs (unfortunately not yet available online as of this writing) has an eponymous piece by Wesley Clark and Peter Levin: in it, they write that
Clark and Levin recount William Safire‘s claim that a 3-kiloton explosion of a Siberian natural gas pipeline in 1982—”the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space”—was the direct consequence of a Trojan inserted into Canadian SCADA software that the CIA allowed the KGB to steal. They recirculate the rumor that the Israeli destruction of a purported Syrian nuclear facility in 2007 was facilitated by a cyberattack targeting Syrian air defense systems. (This blog has linked to other reports of capabilities along similar lines, such as this one.)
But their real focus is (not surprisingly, given Levin’s history as founder of a hardware outfit specializing in the area) is on the problem of validating hardware. DoD has been very concerned with the idea of hardware Trojans the last few years. Nobody in the military/intelligence-industrial complex wants to take it on faith that chips that are manufactured in China or Taiwan don’t have backdoors. There are apparent precedents for the hardware Trojan such as old reports involving Crypto AG. So NSA started up a trusted foundry and DARPA started the TRUST program (whose PM funded some of my research some years back, so I applaud his taste on both counts). But that leaves the vast majority of chips in network components still unaccounted for, including a large number of counterfeit chips.
Clark and Levin propose an emphasis on reconfigurable hardware (such as FPGAs) and the sort of immunological paradigm started by the Forrest group at UNM as an example of a sound defensive strategy. While the practical utility (as compared to the undeniable conceptual elegance) of the paradigm for network defense is not clear to me (but then again I’m obviously a partisan when it comes to the best scientific principles for designing network defense infrastructure), the ideas of using reconfigurable hardware and avoiding a computational and network monoculture that goes hand-in-hand with immunological principles are sound ones that I’ve agreed with for some time. I gained an appreciation of the benefits of FPGAs from performing research on algorithms for reconfigurable computing architectures some years back, and at a conference last year I got into a brief argument on the security dangers of monocultures with a government sysadmin who lauded the monolithic computing infrastructure he maintained. So it’s not a stretch to say that I am extremely sympathetic to their point of view.
Clark and Levin close by highlighting the need for open infrastructure–both reconfigurable hardware and open source software, and (insofar as it can be implemented) this is the entirely correct approach to technological security of any form. As Reagan said: “trust, but verify”.
update 10/23: The article is available here (subscription required).
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 02:06 and is filed under Commentary, Communications security, Equilibrium Networks, Nonrandom bits, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.