Healthy hardware
Interesting article about cybersecurity from Foreign Affairs (login required). The authors focus on the thread of attacks on hardware:
Although networks and software attract most of the media's attention when it comes to cybersecurity, chip-level hardware is similarly vulnerable: deliberate design deficiencies or malicious tampering can easily creep in during the 400-step process required to produce a microchip.
They call for "healthy hardware":
Healthy hardware can adapt to infection, but sick hardware is an incurable liability -- a remote-controlled malignancy that can strike at any time.
To achieve healthy hardware, they advocate a diversification of the hardware infrastructure:
The U.S. government must begin by diversifying the country's digital infrastructure; in the virtual world, just as in a natural habitat, a diversity of species offers the best chance for an ecosystem's survival in the event of an outside invasion. In the early years of the Internet, practically all institutions mandated an electronically monocultural forest of computers, storage devices, and networks in order to keep maintenance costs down. The resulting predominance of two or three operating systems and just a few basic hardware architectures has left the United States' electronic infrastructure vulnerable.
