My 5 Wishes For Security In 2014

All governments will concede that IP addresses are not personally identifiable information. Sorry, IP addresses are different from telephone numbers. In the majority of use cases, they are ephemeral, assigned behind NAT boxes. They change as often in mobile societies as the chairs citizens occupy while mainlining espresso. They’ll become even less unique if Carrier-Grade NAT adoption trumps native deployment of IPv6. And speaking of CGN…

Opposition to Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN) will consolidate. If NATs opened Pandora’s box, CGN unleashes the dogs of hell. More worrisome than the technical issues CGN raises is how badly CGN breaks openness and interferes with popular applications. Fundamentally, ISPs use CGN as a tradeoff between IPv4 addresses that are scarce and ports that are not only plentiful but fully controlled by the carrier. The effect on net neutrality is potentially chilling. NLnet Labs director Olaf Kolkman explains in a presentation on IPv4 as a Strategy that "the CGN-based architecture cannot be neutral any longer because the address-scarcity cannot be fixed by investments or market competition."

National and global wailing over surveillance programs will give way to informed debate over how best to achieve balance, transparency, and accountability. While I don’t want to diminish the importance of revelations of collection or misuse, we seriously need to let go of the outrage and indignation, acknowledge that "none or all" are not practical solutions, and define acceptable parameters of behavior. This thoughtful analysis of surveillance is a good example of what I mean.

Legislators will heed educators and skeptics of STEM and embrace liberal arts as worthy and necessary elements of balanced education. I work in InfoSec alongside respected colleagues who earned philosophy, physics, psychology, and political science degrees. I recently met former concert and improv flautists who are rock-solid privacy experts. STEM-centric education won’t fill the short-horizon shortfall of cybersecurity talent -- and my head spins when I imagine the unintended consequences over the long term. For example, consider how critical trust and ethics are in cooperative society in general and InfoSec in particular. If you set yourselves on a course where only science matters, when and how do you teach ethics? If you must evangelize STEM, at the very least change the "T" to trust and "E" to ethics.

All invested communities will resist the temptation to solve the privacy/surveillance problem using technology (encryption) alone. To do so would avert an arms race or a proliferation of poorly conceived, possibly proprietary encryption-based solutions that offer rights or intellectual property protection, personal data protection, or protection against tracking and warrantless information collection.