Security Skins Replace Security Walls [1]
Dean Styles
Sooty Solutions
Burnaby BC
Abstract. Building walls around our treasures has been a successful practice for
millennium. In the security realm these walls started as physical security;
bricks and concrete that protected our metal boxes full of treasured data. The rapid evolution of communication and
mobile technologies has resulted in an explosion in the number of system we
must manage and secure. The wall as a
security model is failing us.
Biological ecosystems are complex interconnected and
messy. There are many stories of well
meaning attempts to control some aspect of an ecosystem that resulted in an
ecological disaster. DDT used to kill
off malaria mosquitoes poisons birds, which kills the cats, which allows an
explosion in rats, which leads to an outbreak of plague. As our technologies become increasingly
connected in a wireless world we are reaching a level of complexity that is
showing the behaviour of a biological ecology.
New products find ecological niches and radiate into the environment at
an exponential rate. Applications that
cannot adapt quickly become extinct. There are predator/prey cycles as hackers
discover and exploit vulnerabilities.
How then does a security manager provide confidentiality,
integrity and availability in an increasingly complex technological ecosystem?
How do we keep out the bad guys in an increasingly complex world? Perhaps
security needs to be viewed not as a wall but rather as a skin around each
intelligent appliance.
Watch this space for the
complete paper – coming soon.
[1] ©Copyright Sooty Solutions 2006. All Rights Reserved. This document may be copied and distributed royalty free as long it includes this copyright notice and the author’s name. This whitepaper is provided “as is” with no implied warrantees.