As the Internet becomes an increasingly critical system of commerce, a major systemic failure of the Internet could precipitate its own economic failure.
About 35 percent of the world’s population is online; 5 billion devices from cars and kitchen ovens to hospital beds are connected to the network. There are now more than 500 million smart phones. In this hyperconnected world, the acquisition and misuse of personal data is a principal lever of modern crime.
At a January 26 session during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, "Risks in a hyperconnected world," SFI Science Board co-chair and External Professor Stephanie Forrest offered insights about cybersecurity, drawing inspiration from biological systems.
Forrest, a professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico, described the three pillars she considers critical to a security response: diversity (successful attacks across the Internet are often amplified when platforms are uniform); security is not binary (it is a continuum and response strategies should be graduated to suit the level of threat); and self repair (networks and ultimately software applications must be engineered to repair themselves at multiple levels).
“Biology is the science of security,” she said, “and biological organisms have developed multi-level, pervasive systems to deal with security threats.”
Forrest joined panelists Rod Beckstrom, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN); Natarajan Chandrasekaran, Tata Consultancy Services; Neelie Kroes, European Commission; and moderator Robert Wainwright, Europol in calling for international collaboration, standards, and practices for cybersecurity.
More about the World Economic Forum session
Support SFI here