Subject: The technological origins of the current trade war

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2019 11:31:28 -0400

It is now understood by most that the Internet has become critical
infrastructure. That is critical to national security functions and
critical to the fabric of modern civilization.

And we have a huge problem: Nobody can trust that the critical
infrastructure they depend upon has not been sabotaged.

This is not a concern unique to equipment manufactured in China. Many
countries banned government use of US designed equipment in the wake of the
Snowden disclosures. This is a problem inherent in the technology itself
which we have thus far been able to ignore because there has been
sufficient trust in the system that the major powers will not employ these
capabilities against each other.

We are now at a point where reserves of goodwill are exhausted. There are
those who believe that chaos is a ladder and they wish to climb. There is a
real risk that the current wave of bad faith accusations will spark real
retaliation. If progress in technology stalls, the global economy stalls
and should that happen there will be fewer resources available to address
the real ecological and material challenges we face.

So here is the challenge: We must start building technologies that are
verifiably trustworthy even if they are compromised during manufacture.

That may seem like an impossible challenge and of course it is impossible
if we insist on the criteria that no system ever be vulnerable under any
circumstance. But what we need here is resilience, not a perfect guarantee
that no system is ever compromised.

Achieving resilience will require us to develop at least some new
technology but there is a vast amount of existing technology that is not
being used. We are attempting to meet the security challenges of the 2020s
Internet with the security technology of the 1980s. Of course AES is better
than DES and SHA2 is better than MD4. But we aren't making use of new
principles.

Today we conceive the role of a firewall to be a policy enforcement point
blocking unauthorized traffic. It is a role that firewalls are increasingly
unable to realize as encryption becomes the default. Perhaps it is time to
start thinking in terms of policy verification.

There is no way that we can prevent a device being compromised during
manufacture using current technology. But we can mitigate the impact of
that compromise so that it affects a single machine rather than the entire
network. We can also develop infrastructures that allow the fact that a
device has been compromised to be detected with some degree of certainty.

If we don't start thinking in terms of resilience soon, our customers are
going to start forcing us to think in those terms because they are the ones
caught in the middle of this fight.