Advances in Cyber Security: Technology, Operations, and Experiences

Building a Secure and Sustainable Cyberspace Ecosystem:An Overview

1 Building a Secure and Sustainable Cyberspace Ecosystem: An Overview D. Frank Hsu This overview provides a historical and contemporary perspective on various issues pertaining to the security and sustainability of the emerging cyberspace, which is embedded with intelligent networking sensors and systems, as well as information technology appliances and services. In particular , it explores how to build a secure and sustainable cyberspace ecosystem in the combined cyber-physical-natural (CPN) world. Its three sections give an overview of the emerging interconnected complex cyberspace, review the infrastructure for the combined CPN cyberspace, and provide a list of intellectual tools for collaboration, education, and partnership in order to build and sustain a secure cyberspace ecosystem. Finally, this overview emphasizes the need for establishing an international consortium and a cyber security informatics framework to facilitate coordination and collaboration among cyber security professionals and practitioners from government, academia, and industry across national and international boundaries. I hope this overview will serve as a catalyst for all cyberspace stakeholders to develop 2 D. Frank Hsu new ideas and construct novel solutions to address global challenges and create opportunities for a secure cyberspace ecosystem. The Emerging Complex Cyberspace This section provides a holistic overview of the emerging complex cyberspace in terms of four diverse perspectives: digital landscape, technology capacity, the fifth domain, and the fourth paradigm. The Digital Landscape Human civilization has evolved from an agricultural society to an industrial society and then to an information society. Since the Internet’s establishment in the 1960s and the World Wide Web’s conception in the 1990s, the number of information users and providers has increased exponentially. A vast amount of information content with great variety has been created, stored, processed, transmitted, and utilized. These range from simple text, speech, and images, to histories of interactions with friends, colleagues, sources, sensors, systems, and proxies [85]. Raw data sources on the Internet also include sensor readings from GPS, GIS, and RFID devices, medical devices such as MRI and EEG, and other embedded sensors, systems, and robots in one environment or in the infrastructure of the information society. Communication conduits for transmitting digital content have evolved in speed and bandwidth from twisted pairs for voice to coaxial cables for images and finally to optical fibers for voice, text, and images. The networks that facilitate this rapid communication use wireline, wireless, satellite, and Internet interconnections. At the same time, the point of contact—the device we use to access information or information network—improves in size, scope, and scale. These devices, which we now call information appliances, include radio, TV, iPods, iPhones, BlackBerrys, laptops, notebooks, desktops , and iPads. The capabilities of these devices increase, yet their cost decreases. These devices constitute a host of pervasive computing and communication systems in the cyber world. In the physical and natural world, human beings have made great strides toward personalized medicine and public health due to the scientific revolu- Building a Secure and Sustainable Cyberspace Ecosystem 3 tion in genetics, genomics, and proteomics in the past century, but more so since the 1950s. In addition, a renewed emphasis on translational science (from bench to bed side) has enhanced capability in the diagnosis, screening , and treatment of diseases and disorders. More recently, the concept of a molecular network, which connects molecular biology to clinical medicine through the omics pathways (metabolomics, genomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics) has become a foundation and a major focus of translational science [93]. On the other hand, due to the advent of imaging technology, cellular and molecular biology, bioinformatics, systems and computational neuroscience , and brain and cognitive informatics, we have increased our understandingofthestructureandfunctionoftheneuralsystem .Brainconnectivity and its computational power has enabled us to know more about basic sensory and motor systems, memory, perception, cognition, and even behavior than we did before. Any change in human physiology resulting from the function of the neuronal network in the brain, with 100 billion neurons, would lead to a change in human cognition and behavior [7, 89]. The Technology Capacity Networking, information, and communication technologies (NICT) are the driving engines for the information society, where economic wealth is generated, political power is exercised, and cultural codes are created [15]. It would be helpful and interesting to quantify the amount of information processed by the information society. Lesk [71] asked, “How much information is there in the world?” Pool [91] estimated the growing trends of information (measured as amounts of words) transmitted by seventeen major...