Search Results

This chapter explains how cybersecurity increasingly connects to consumer safety and critical industrial infrastructure, as well as the digital economy and systems of democracy. Thus, the stakes of cyber-physical security have never been higher. From attacks on the energy sector to the attacks on the consumer Internet of things and democracy, cybersecurity governance is an existential concern in society. Regrettably, security is woefully inadequate. Market incentives privilege rapid product introduction rather than strong security. The chapter then suggests baseline recommendations, across all stakeholders, necessary for improving the cyber-physical ecosystem. It also looks at how cyber-physical systems complicate and increasingly shape already-difficult global cybersecurity governance questions such as when governments choose to stockpile knowledge of software vulnerabilities for cyber offense, rather than disclose them to secure critical infrastructure.

This chapter addresses the critical area of cyber-physical system privacy. Cyber-physical system privacy concerns encroach into intimate spaces in and around the body and in material spaces of industry, the home and society that were once distinctly bounded from the digital sphere. Privacy problems are also concerns about discrimination, such as using collected data for employment, insurance, and law enforcement decisions. Privacy problems in digital-physical spaces also raise a host of national security concerns. The chapter then explains some of the constraints that complicate privacy and recommends a baseline privacy-protection framework to address this extraordinary policy challenge. Transparency and notice to consumers about data gathering and sharing practices should represent absolute minimal standards of practice. But even this minimal standard is difficult to attain.

This chapter addresses how discourses around Internet freedom have served a variety of interests and ideologies. However, all of the various conceptions of Internet freedom have to be challenged in light of technological change. Traditional notions of Internet freedom are disconnected from actual technical, political, and market conditions. Internet freedom has a long history, but all incarnations center on the transmission and free flow of content, from John Perry Barlow's “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” and calls for freedom from regulation to the United States Department of State's Internet freedom foreign-policy campaign. Normative frameworks should adjust both to the realities of information control from private ordering and authoritarian power and the rising human rights challenges of cyber-physical systems.

This chapter looks at the current state of physical systems controlled by an onboard computer. Typically this covers transportation systems such as cars, aircraft, railway systems, space systems, or even medical devices, all of them either for the expected harmfulness for people, or for the huge cost associated with their failure. The chapter shows how the increase of computer use in those systems has led to huge benefits, but also an exponential growth in complexity. Furthermore, the drawback of this massive introduction of computers to control systems is the lack of predictability for both computer and software. This chapter shows how the aerospace industry, and more generally critical embedded systems industries, is now facing a huge increase in the software size in their systems. This in turn creates a greater system complexity increase because of safety or performance objectives. Moreover, this complexity leads to the need to integrate even more advanced algorithms to sustain autonomy and energy efficiency.