Security Notes: Understanding Unpredictability

Alan Turing is seen as the Moses who led us all to the promised cyber land. His blueprint for a computing machine is the foundation of all the machines that have communicated worldwide, creating the ghostly universe of cyber. It was the same Alan Turing who posed the question: will it be possible to stealthily substitute humans in cyberspace? Could a machine in cyberspace become indistinguishable from a biological person?

Alan Turing foresaw what modern technology bears out. Increasingly we can’t tell the difference. This conclusion comes with big philosophical baggage, and it also rings a loud alarm bell: fraud, deception, and crime have technology on their side.

With all the videos we watch, and with all the artificial reality that dazzles us, it is easy to forget that cyberspace is composed of streams of binary bits. It all breaks down to ones and zeros. And all those bits that flow out of humans can be imitated by a machine. One audio file of your normal conversation is all that is needed for a computer to fake your voice, your accent, to say something you did not say.

A few headshots become the input for a machine that instantly generates a video of you talking, smiling, frowning, etc. Indeed, deep-fake technology can generate fully believable pictures and videos of people who do not exist.  As it goes, cyberspace has no guaranteed mooring in physical reality.

And then came Covid. As physical engagements became even more scarce, social engagement became close to 100% cyber—and 100% crime prone. And the most profitable field for the exploiters of this technology is payments. Indications are that personal identities are stolen at an alarming rate, all while the government is busy with more pressing challenges posed by the virus. The police, too, are too distracted to deal with non-violent cyber crimes. It’s a perfect storm, with Bitcoin becoming the unofficial currency of the growing class of cyber criminals.

How to tackle this problem? Much hope and enthusiasm are vested in blockchain technology and in the power of the community of traders united by a governing protocol.  Alas, if this community is made up of fake members, then so are its products.

The fundamental way to meet this Alan Turing imitation challenge is to moor cyberspace to physical space. Many solutions fit under this theme and they deserve strategic attention before it is too late.

Many mistakenly regard the use of biometrics as physical mooring. Biometrics is effective when a person is physically measured against his stored record, not in cyber space, where stolen biometric signatures readily steal identities.

A set of solution tools is being developed through nanotechnology, constructing sophisticated “physical anchors” for cyberspace.  The flow of payment bits emanates from a physical chip where the money is stored in the chemical bonds therein, off the digital realm, immune to hacks. This technology leads to a hard digital wallet.

This is the revolutionary third leg. Normally, payees accept a payment by validating either the money or the payer. The hard wallet satisfies the payee on being paid from a trusted hard physical wallet. It’s not very useful for remote payment, but it keeps the money flowing when the Internet is down since the wallet runs on a battery and operates on short-range communication.

It will take time, though, and until we turn the tide, we need to make the best use of the tools we have. In particular, it’s best to keep changing payment habits. Our habit inertia is what hackers are counting on and homing into. Unpredictability is the powerful weapon we all underdeploy.

—By Gideon Samid, gideon@bitmint.com