(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore: Perspectives on Information Security

Intelligent comments desired:

http://cybersecurity.nitrd.gov/

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/05/19/help-change-game-cybersecurity

Recently, this story about a researcher “infecting” himself with a computer virus has made headlines in all sorts of computer press (e.g., Techworld, Slashdot, and Financial Times — this last via ACM Technews).

The MSN article states: “University of Reading researcher Mark Gasson has become the first human known to be infected by a computer virus.”

This statement simply isn’t true — not because he wasn’t *infected*, but because *he* wasn’t infected. The same outcome / lesson would have happened if:

– the chip was on a USB stick in his pocket or keychain
– the chip was tied to a piece of string around his finger
– the chip was glued to his finger
– etc.

All this publicity stunt teaches us is that you can purposefully insert code onto microchips that have an RFID radio. Shocking. This kind of activity has an impact on the credibility of the computing profession because IT folks (among others) ask themselves in amazement: “PhDs get paid to do THAT? It isn’t even research…”

The underlying issue is about the permeability of the definition of the word “human” — I guess his message is that people are more likely to consider small, unobtrusive devices as part of themselves.

Anyway, this line of thinking is a couple of years old:

http://www.rfidvirus.org/

M.R. Rieback et al., Is Your Cat Infected with a Computer Virus?, in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom2006), pp.169-179, Pisa, Italy, March 2006.

From the University of Calgary’s “Procedures Pertaining to Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure of Academic Staff“:

Academic freedom is the right of academic appointees to examine, to question, to teach, to learn, to
investigate, to speculate, to comment, to criticize, to write, to publish and the like, freely, without
pressure, direct or indirect, to conform to or defer to prescribed doctrines.