The Future of High Technology

As the global marketplace continues to change and becomes more dependent upon technology, the need for corporate IE assets protection will become greater and more complicated. It is obvious that the technological trend to make microprocessors, and everything that they are used for, smaller, more powerful, and cheaper will continue. This coupled with the ever-increasing bandwidth, multimedia, and personal communications systems will provide for a microportability only dreamed of and shown in science fiction movies. Furthermore, the wireless age coupled with the integration of devices into one device—for example, combining Internet access, telephone, database, digital photography, and television—will offer new challenges to ISSO professionals.

The need to have such devices in order to work, shop, and access information will require that everyone be guaranteed such a system as an inherent right as a citizen of an Information Age nation-state. Without such devices, the government will be "depriving" the citizens of everything from due process to the right to work. The Internet, which seemed a novelty not so long ago, will be in truth one of the mainstream methods of working and communicating.

The development of more sophisticated systems that are able to understand and react to normal human speech will become commonplace. This technology will be a major breakthrough that will allow previously computer illiterate individuals to use the power of the computers, networks, and the Internet to work, play, and communicate. This will allow people who could either not afford a computer or could not learn how to use one to become better-educated and valuable members of societies with less effort. Voice recognition security will become a major necessity to protect assets in the voice recognition environment. ISSO professionals must begin now to learn all they can about biometrics, nanotechnology, wireless systems, and such high technology to be prepared to address such issues as voice recognition access to IE assets in the future.

Enhanced technology will continue to support the drive to global telemedicine, where the best specialists in the world will be in a position to medically assist anyone, anywhere, at any time. However, with this enhanced use of the Internet will come telemedicine murders. These will be accomplished by changing medical test results or the automated dosages of prescription drugs, and denying telemedicine services. Security and law enforcement specialists will be involved in conducting murder investigations where the crime scene will be the Internet.

The future will also bring us biological computers. For example, it is rumored that some are even looking at using electrically charged amoebas or other methods that can allow a direct interface with the human brain. Such incredibly advanced computers could perhaps store the entire history of the human race on a single chip. Who will determine what is contained in that history? What are the social ramifications of such dramatic extensions to personal information access? What happens if a criminal or a terrorist embeds a virus, logic bomb, or other malicious software in a computer extension attached to your brain? What input do ISSO professionals currently have in this research? None. However, for InfoSec, for example, access criteria, will be a major issue. How does one ensure the integrity of the hardware, software, firmware, and information that is to be embedded for access by the brain? ISSO professionals may require a degree in some field of medicine in order to successfully perform their asset protection duties vis- -vis telemedicine.

The "wireless age" is already upon us, and with it the increased use of technology allowing mobile electronic communications from any place on earth to anywhere. As the growth of wireless networks continues worldwide, it will bring with it more threats from sophisticated, international criminals. Such threats will include an increased use of jamming techniques as a denial of service, to commit electronic extortion or to harm a competitor's ability to perform electronic commerce on the Internet. As more forms of public communication come to rely on the Internet, we expect that more sophisticated eavesdropping techniques will rise, which will allow Internet miscreants, business adversaries, and government agencies to invade personal privacy to their respective ends. The increasing use of the many Internet telephone and video teleconference systems which are vulnerable to eavesdropping will make this more common.

Encryption will continue to become more sophisticated while the issue of key management overhead costs, prohibitions on exporting of effective encryption methods, will continue to be debated on a global scale. Nation-states' security agencies will require and continue to obtain access to encrypted communications via "key escrow." (No, the issue is not dead. It has "gone covert" because of the bad publicity and concerns that have been voiced over this concept.) Also, "backdoors" will be used, but on a massive scale. There have already been attempts to outlaw all encryption that does not meet a nation's "standards." That of course was impossible to enforce; however, the basic issue is still alive and well. For indications of software backdoors, just look at the software vendors who have contracts with the National Security Agency of the United States and other high-technology-dependent nation-states.

Do you trust your government to have "backdoor" access to your corporation's sensitive and vital networks and information without your control or knowledge? How do you know what the government agents and bureaucrats are doing with that information? Government employees are human, and there are those who betray their countries. Can you place alarms on such systems without the knowledge of the vendors who may be cooperating with the government by placing backdoors in their vendor-provided products? Furthermore, if there are backdoors, they are also vulnerable to attack by competitors and other governments. Is it any wonder why some government agencies of nation-states don't use Microsoft's operating systems? Maybe they don't feel comfortable with Microsoft's employees working so closely with the U.S. National Security Agency staff. Does anyone really believe that there are no backdoors in today's software?

Other nation-states with less sophisticated technology will request that technology in order to allow Internet communications to transit their nation. Others will prohibit any encryption under the banner of "national security interests." Their concern, and excuse, will be the use of encryption by factions whose purpose is to bring down the current government, or to attack corporations.

These vulnerabilities will be exploited by other nation-states and Internet miscreants, who will become more sophisticated in decrypting communications as computers become more and more sophisticated and as massive chaining of computers is used to break encrypted messages. Also, they will be usable to find and exploit the government-required, vendor-provided backdoors. As an ISSO professional, are you aware of other techniques such as steganography? If not, you should be, as their use will increase in the future.

Copyright violations on the Internet will continue unabated with more and more information being made available on a massive scale. The "software police" and others will be so overwhelmed that they will only attempt to investigate and prosecute those cases that provide good public relations for the agency and are major violations. These issues will continue to be a concern of only a few of the most mature Information Age nation-states. Other nation-states, including some members of the European Union, East European nation-states, and other nation-states, such as those in Asia, South America, and Africa, will provide only token assistance. This will be done in order to rapidly and cheaply bring their nation-states into the Information Age through the use of "free" copyrighted information. As an ISSO for a corporation that has copyright issues, what are you doing to protect the copyrighted corporate assets?

Political factions and "pressure groups" with common causes, such as "Save the Whales," will become more active in denying the use of the Internet and Web sites of those businesses or government agencies whose actions are opposed by the factions.

Information warfare will play an increased role in 21st-century warfare. Civilized nation-states today have little tolerance for violence, human death, and suffering. The use of computers and networks to fight the information wars of the future will become more common as they offer a cheap, rapid, and powerful "weapon of mass destruction."

Electronic and computer weapons to destroy an adversary's information infrastructure, and thus its economic power, will take on more importance. The use of the Internet by military forces and techno-terrorists will continue to increase as a nation's adversaries become more dependent on information systems and the Internet for their political and economic power.

Electronic commerce is already on the Internet, and the Internet is too large for corporations and Internet miscreants to ignore. Billions of dollars' worth of transactions will be conducted each year. To have electronic commerce, one must have sellers, customers, and infrastructure to transfer goods, services, and money securely. Security will continue to be enhanced, thus providing reasonable, cheap, simple transaction security. This will happen exponentially and cause a rapid expansion of electronic commerce through the Internet.

Perry Luzwick ^[5] of Northrop Grumman's Corporation's Information Technology Group has pointed out:

New technologies have affected competitive advantage by:

• Leveraging existing strategies or efforts

• Enabling new and unexpected strategic uses of existing technology

• Providing new capabilities

• Neutralizing or mitigating the effects of competitors' capabilities and strategies

• Providing or denying the element of surprise

The enactment of international laws will lag behind high technology and international crimes, making it extremely difficult to identify, apprehend, and prosecute global criminals across national boundaries. Some successes will of course occur, as in the international fight against child pornography. However, the more sophisticated, financially based, Internet-based miscreants will grow in number because ISSO professionals lack the capabilities to protect against them and law enforcement professionals lack the capabilities to investigate and apprehend them.

^[5]Perry Luzwick is the Director, Information Assurance Architectures at Northrop Grumman Information Technology, a Northrop Grumman company, and coauthor of the book Global Information Warfare, published with Andy Jones and Dr. Kovacich by Auerbach Publishers, 2002.