Chapter 16: Future Trends

Overview

Key concepts in this chapter are:

• Analyzing the arms race between hackers and security developers

• Evaluating future trends

It’s a warm sunny afternoon in the seaside forest bordering a beach in beautiful Costa Rica. The year is 2020. A robot monkey descends from the branches of a tree and offers you a cool drink. You lie back in your hammock, stretching after a long pleasant snooze. You sip the delicious cool drink and send the robot monkey to find some snacks as you switch on a satellite-linked Tablet PC and begin connecting to the headquarters of your global empire. Twenty years ago, people laughed when you began selling miniature plastic dinosaurs from a van somewhere in western Washington, but who’s laughing now? Those little lizards made you rich. You press your thumb onto the touch screen, and there is a slight hiss of escaping gas as the computer samples your body’s DNA and uses your code of life as the unique key to encrypt a message into a beam of light that is sent off to a satellite. Within milliseconds, hackers in neighboring Nicaragua tap into your satellite link and attempt to hijack your connection by emulating your Internet address. They are using a new hacking technique discovered less than an hour ago, but the satellite has already been patched against the vulnerability and you don’t even notice the failed attack as you begin poring over the massive numbers of purchase orders for miniature plastic dinosaurs that have come from all civilized corners of the solar system.

Wake up, you’re daydreaming again! Perhaps this little story truly does describe your destiny, the shape of tomorrow’s robots, and the future of security. However, don’t get complacent yet—security faces a lot of challenges, and besides, you still have to sell all those plastic dinosaurs. Before looking at future trends, let’s start by looking at what is happening today: the arms race of hacking.