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Computer-Security Experts Challenge Researchers to Focus on Long-Term Solutions |
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Source: ACM TechNews November 24th, 2003 |
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Purdue University's Eugene Spafford was one of five speakers at a recent
Virginia conference who suggested strategies computer scientists could follow
to implement long-term cybersecurity solutions. Spafford declared at a news
conference that computer networks should be rethought to include embedded,
effective, and easy-to-use security. However, he remarked that "Near-term
needs are so pressing that they have soaked up most of the resources and most
of the funding and left little for long-term thinking. It's an ongoing arms
race in cyberspace." Spafford, who predicted that better network security
will encourage people to engage in more online activity and create better
services, identified four "grand challenges" that researchers should address
within a decade: The halt of spam, viruses, worms, and denial-of-service
attacks; the development of tools to build large-scale, highly trustworthy
networks; the creation of systems that give users the ability to comfortably
control their privacy and security; and the design of risk-management
analyses for computer systems that offer just as much reliability as
financial investment risk-management analyses. Spafford also expressed hope
that the federal government will allocate more funds to network security
research. Other speakers at the forum included Sun Microsystems' Susan
Landau, who noted that medical care could be significantly enhanced if
security and reliability were incorporated into computer networks. The
Virginia conference was held by the Association of Computing Machinery and
the Computing Research Association, while the National Science Foundation
used the event to announce that it would soon start accepting research
proposals for improving computer security under its CyberTrust program. Purdue Prof. Christina Nita-Rotaru also attended this conference.
The complete story is available at the Chronical for Higher Education website |