The phone companies that survive will become cellular phone companies. “Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime” is a good motto for a 21st century phone company. There will be flat rates for so-called “long-distance.” Any nation or PTT which tries to cling to current long-distance telephony billing practices will see their economy destroyed by others with more enlightened policies.
People won’t use these networks if they don’t trust them. Internet is run by an increasingly large group of organizations, and nobody is responsible for security. That means users have to be able to protect themselves, and encryption is the solution. [Unless privacy and access issues are solved with an acceptable public policy, similar to the rules that govern the telephone system today,] you create fundamental problems for democracy.
The use of e-mail raises interesting privacy issues. In the case of e-mail, privacy issues arise when people lose control over the dissemination of their mail messages. When should managers be allowed to read the e-mail of their subordinates? One can readily conjure instances where managers would seek access to e-mail files.
If more and more Internet users erect one-way barriers, “the services you can use are more limited.”
If the prospects of democracy on the Internet are viewed in terms of encryption, then the security of the existing national government becomes the limit of the matter: what is secure for the nation-state is taken to mean true security for everyone, a highly dubious proposition. The question of potentials for new forms of social space that might empower individuals in new ways are foreclosed in favor of preserving existing relations of force as they are viewed by the most powerful institution in the history of the world: the government of the United States.
Need tickets to a Broadway show? Your computer will handle the transaction. Just give it a price range, seating preference and a credit card. Computers will even make it easier for you to link to a doctor in another city or connect people around the world in virtual classrooms. “Those kind of technologies will become ubiquitous with more processing power.”
Encryption is often touted as the ultimate weapon in the computer security wars. It is not. It is certainly a valuable tool, but it, like everything else, is a tool toward an ultimate goal. Indeed, if encryption is used improperly, it can hurt the real goals of the organization.
We recommend using firewalls to protect networks. We define a firewall as a collection of components placed between two networks that collectively have the following properties: All traffic from inside to outside, and vice-versa, must pass through the firewall; only authorized traffic, as defined by the local security policy, will be allowed to pass; the firewall itself is immune to penetration.
If the intruder can compromise the system, he or she will be able to attack other systems, by taking over either root, and hence the systemÕs identity, or some user account. It might seem that we are unduly pessimistic about the state of computer security. This is half-true: we are pessimistic, but not, we think, unduly so. Nothing in the recent history of either network security or software engineering gives us any reason to believe otherwise. Nor are we alone in feeling this way.
The advent of mobile computing will also stress traditional security architectures. We see this today, to some extent, with the need to pass X11 through the firewall. It will be more important in the future. How does one create a firewall that can protect a portable computer, one that talks to its home network via a public IP network? Certainly, all communication can be encrypted, but how is the portable machine itself to be protected from network-based attacks? What services must it offer, in order to function as a mobile host? What about interactions with local facilities, such as printers or disk space?