Businesses are going to have to take responsibility for protecting themselves … for a long time we’re going to have to be very suspicious about who we connect to. Ideally the NII [National Information Infrastructure] would contain totally embedded security, but I don’t think we can expect that in the near future.
People will access NII [National Information Infrastructure] services using all different forms of access: passwords, tokens, maybe biometrics in some cases. We need some standards for capturing the authentication information, and for passing it around the network
It is not realistic to expect that there will be on algorithm or one standard for encryption … We are not going to have one way of doing things … So there may be security agents on the network that facilitate mapping one technique to another, and make the differences invisible to the users.
Monetary transactions will take place through cyberspace if people believe that it is protected. And the same thing is true for medical records. If people believe that there is security and that the network cannot be cracked, then they will use if for financial and other purposes. Superhighway industries will be born only as assurances can be given that there is security on these networks.
Private industry will construct the network but the government needs to manage the regulatory environment to ensure that monopolies are not recreated that would drive competitors out of the marketplace. Competition and consumer protection go hand in hand.
The possibilities [for hacking attacks] are really good. Public networks will make all sorts of new wire-tapping possible. Packet data networks – including the Internet – are broadcast media, which send traffic through hub sites that don’t give you the same level of confidence as the phone company. There are many more opportunities in the data world for wiretapping and spoofing attacks … Link-layer encryption will become nearly universal, along with end-to-end application encryption.
Secure-HTTP will eliminate possible violation problems, we must ask how happy our potential foreign trading partners will be with it. We’re essentially saying that we will communicate over the infohighway with them using crypotography that is deliberately weakened.
Companies’ customer references will be online, out in the open. That’s got to make businesses more concerned with their performance and image.
The superhighway’s adoption curve actually will be more rapid than any technology we’ve seen before.
1,000 companies will participate in this kind of electronic commerce across the nation’s information superhighway within one year, and a million companies within five years. And I think those are quite conservative numbers.