The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [47]
During the Christmas season, the political pace slowed down. Vital people simply vanished from Washington. Contacts did not answer e-mail. Van was glad for the chance to concentrate. His emptied head was buzzing with hot new technical ideas.
Back in his Washington apartment, Van was waiting for his latest batch of code to compile. Living in a high-crime area had brought Van useful insights about real-world security. In real life, if you had a solid wall, then you could lock the door. If one lock wasn’t enough, it helped to install five or six locks.
But computer networks didn’t have walls. So the “firewall” metaphor was just that, a metaphor.
A far more fertile approach would be a computational immune system. After all, the vast majority of serious computer attacks were not carried out by outside hackers. Hackers did not “break in” through anything that could “break.” Most real-life computer acts-of-evil were carried out by crooked insiders already within the firewall. Thieves or double agents, people who knew the system already. Usually, they knew very well what they wanted to corrupt, erase, alter, or illicitly copy.
So a better security model would not “lock” or “wall away” anything. Instead, it would scan constantly for evil processes inside the machine. It would hunt for bad acts inside the system, in the way that the bloodstream fights germs.
This was an exciting new paradigm. It offered fruitful ways forward that resolved a host of the day’s knottiest security challenges. The concept was a generation ahead of its time. Maybe two generations, given the awful state of the computer market.
All the more vital, then, that the CCIAB should pioneer a serious breakthrough like that. They could run it within the Vault, an ideal place to start a working demo for a core audience. A streaming distributed supercomputer, on broadband wireless, featuring a pilot, alpha-rollout immune system.
This inspiration set Van’s brain afire. It was fantastic. And it was really likely to work, too, that was the best part. The CCIAB didn’t have a whole lot of money, but they did have the attention of the top experts in the field. There was no competition in creating computer immune systems. There were no stovepipes. There were no established industry vendors trying to protect market share.
So they could farm the project out just like Open Source, develop it quickly, quietly, in closed modules, on a need-to-know basis. So while Jeb was struggling with the state of federal security in his political, bureaucratic way, he, Van, would be literally building and assembling the future of computer security. Hands-on. The real deal. Proof-of-concept. Wow.
Van’s son flickered onto his laptop screen, the size of a postage stamp. Ted’s creche in distant Colorado featured a webcam. Both Van and Dottie commonly watched Ted’s webcam during their workdays, though nothing much ever happened there. The day care was run by a bouncy, well-scrubbed Buddhist feminist from Boulder, a thirty-something woman in braids, who wore denim overalls and a head kerchief. She commonly sat cross-legged in her Timberland boots as her little charges crawled all over her. Sometimes she read them non-gender-specific fairy tales. Ted seemed to find this treatment more or less okay. He definitely looked a little bewildered sometimes.
Sometimes Van would touch his son’s flickering image on the screen and murmur a few words. He couldn’t help himself.
On the day after Christmas, Van squinted through the peephole of the apartment door and was stunned to see Tony Carew.
Van undid three locks and two chains. Tony slipped inside, with a final wary glance down the gloomy hall. Tony wore a pale, tailored trench coat, a spotless snap-brimmed hat. He looked very Washington. He’d never looked that way before, but he sure looked it now.
“Van, you’re a hard guy to find. Don’t you answer your phone?”
“No. Not anymore.”
Tony confronted the apartment. He summed it up and dismissed it in disbelief. “Is this a safehouse? If so,