Communications of the ACM
Crowdsourcing America's Cybersecurity Is an Idea So Crazy It Might Just Work
Crowdsourced cybersecurity would involved free, transparent sharing of computer code used to identify cyberthreats between the public and private sectors.
Credit: Larry Downing/Reuters
Crowdsourced cybersecurity is a concept gaining ground, and its practical application would involve free, transparent sharing of computer code used to identify cyberthreats between the public and private sectors.
One example initiated last December was the U.S. Army Research Lab's addition of the free Dshell forensic analysis network to the popular GitHub code sharing website. The Lab's William Glodek says the shared code would "help facilitate the transition of knowledge and understanding to our partners in academia and industry who face the same problems."
Glodek also wants to "give back to the cyber community, while increasing collaboration between the Army, the Department of Defense, and external partners to improve our ability to detect and understand cyberattacks." Such efforts could be complemented with more recruitment of white hat hackers into the government's cybersecurity programs, while Silicon Valley could play a key role in the crowdsourcing of intelligence threats.
Successful cybersecurity crowdsourcing will need to overcome pitfalls such as the risk that such openness might lead to enemy infiltration of government cyberdefense systems. Another issue is people's distrust of the intelligence community as fallout from the U.S. National Security Agency surveillance scandal.
From The Washington Post
View Full Article - May Require Free Registration
Abstracts Copyright © 2015 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found