Cybersecurity of everyday and disruptive technologies
Cybersecurity is of utmost importance to modern digital infrastructure. As digitalisation has reached more and more into our everyday lives, the threat landscape for all of us has changed dramatically.
Nowadays, we talk about disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and 6G communications and their potential to bring about radical change in business and society at large. From a cybersecurity perspective, these technologies pose challenges that we need to tackle. In many cases, security for these technologies is an afterthought, which makes building truly robust and secure systems difficult.
These disruptive technologies are also somewhat unknown to us, and we don’t always know how to secure them. Although many of the basic principles of cybersecurity apply to these technologies, the details of implementation may be different from those we are accustomed to. It is always possible that new technologies have completely new risks and threats for which we need to develop new mitigations.
As one of the disruptive technologies of today, 6G is no exception to the above issues. Although every generation of cellular communications technology has been developed with improved security methods and controls, there is still work to do. When communications become an integral and necessary part of the underlying fabric of our society, security needs to improve and evolve to rise to the new challenges. We need to secure the new 6G networks against adversaries that may have access to some disruptive technology of their own, such as cryptography-breaking quantum computers. We need to make sure that these security measures do not impact the needs of the end users too much. And we must be aware of the more mundane threats that might still be used effectively against this new technology.
If disruptive technology is successful, it will become everyday technology at some point. This has happened with, for example, the Internet, smartphones and computers. We have learned over the years how to make these more secure, but some of the original design choices and ideas have made building security much more difficult. When we are now starting to build new technologies, we should not lose the lessons learned, but instead take them into use. This way, once the new technologies become commonplace, we will have better security and be ready for novel use cases.
It is also important to remember that most new innovations will be built on top of old and existing technologies. In many cases, the new disruptions can be heavily reliant on the old systems and technologies. Thus, we need to secure our (boring?) everyday technologies in order to build secure disruptive technologies. This requires a lot of work, which needs to begin now.
And for the future, we need to choose security from the start.
About the author
Professor of Cybersecurity