Addressing the Roots of Internet Insecurity

It’s no secret that today’s policymakers are grappling with technical realities in an effort to develop comprehensive laws and policies that address innovation as well as concern for privacy and security. Now more than ever, understanding cybersecurity and the causes of internet insecurity are critical to lawmakers.

As Hariri Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Computer Science Sharon Goldberg explains, “the internet was designed several decades ago as a network for universities, for graduate students to send each other emails, to do scientific computing—not for what it’s doing today.” Years later, the result of this construction is a web of vulnerabilities that allow attackers to listen, intercept, and tamper with the flow of internet traffic.

Goldberg was joined by other two speakers, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist for the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Joseph Calandrino, research director for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Office of Technology Research and Investigation, in a recent briefing for  the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus. The three addressed security risks, and what can and cannot be done to fix them—from BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to the DNS (Domain Name System) for IP addresses to the Internet of things (IoT). As Nick Leiserson, a staff member for Congressman Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), noted, there is a tremendous need for an ongoing dialog with non-partisan academics and experts “who can translate technology in ways policymakers can understand.”

[Read the full BU Today article]