Digital Resilience by Ray Rothrock

Author:Ray Rothrock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AMACOM
Published: 2018-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

CREATING DIGITAL RESILIENCE ONE NODE AT A TIME

In its early evolution from the ARPANET and NSFNet, the Internet incorporated in its architecture and protocols the rudiments of resilience (Chapter 4). As the Internet has grown from four networked university computer systems (at UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah) in 1969 to quite probably a trillion or more nodes in 2016, it has become less rather than more resilient. Senator Warner has called for “improved tools to better protect American consumers, manufacturers, retailers, Internet sites and service providers.” This is laudable, but we need more than tools. We need—and by we, I mean all stakeholders in the Internet, which is very nearly everyone on our intensively networked planet—to create a culture that prioritizes resilience. To be sure, we must give security a high priority, but we also must acknowledge that no practical degree of security will ever be bulletproof.

We need to design our systems to withstand the inevitable shots that manage to find their targets. In the meantime, we must recognize that the Internet is vulnerable, which means that our thoroughly intertwined digital and analog networks—physical, social, political, financial, mechanical, and kinetic—have created an inherently unstable, insecure, and nonresilient environment. This being the case, we must design whatever networks we control to be resilient. Whether those networks consist of a handful of devices connected to the Internet or a vast corporate intranet that connects thousands of nodes to the Internet, we must take measures to ensure their resilience. This is a matter of immediate self-defense and the defense of those who are our customers, employees, and investors. This is also our contribution to the defense of the Internet we all share. Each resilient node and element of resilient architecture we add to the Internet contributes to our collective digital resilience.

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