Critical Infrastructure protection - maybe thinking good thoughts will make us safe

By Scott Bradner

Joe Lieberman (I-CT) retired in January after quite a colorful two-dozen years in the US Senate. One of the major issues he pushed during the last few years in office was the protection of the US critical infrastructure. Lieberman, along with Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), put forth a series of bills aimed at requiring some level of protection for such infrastructure. The last of these was voted down in November 2012. (http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/268053-senate-rejects-cybersecurity-act-for-second-time)

President Obama has now issued a "Presidential Policy Directive" on "Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience". (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/presidential-policy-directive-critical-infrastructure-security-and-resil) This directive was accompanied by an Executive Order on "Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity" (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/executive-order-improving-critical-infrastructure-cybersecurity). Sadly the President's efforts may turn out to be about as useful as Joe's.

Joe's efforts ultimately failed because 2012 was an election year. (http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/politics-1-cybersecurity-0) But the big beef against his bill was that it actually wanted companies to take responsibility for the risks that they had created themselves. Senator John McCain headed the attacks saying " unelected bureaucrats at the DHS could promulgate prescriptive regulations on American businesses, which own roughly 90% of critical cyber infrastructure". (http://readwrite.com/2012/02/17/its-dueling-cybersecurity-bill)

I will admit that the fact that the Lieberman/Collins bill would have put the Department of Homeland Security - you know, the people that bring you the security theater that is the TSA - in charge of protecting critical infrastructure made it a lot harder to take the proposal seriously. But the McCain assumption that the folks that run our power plants, hospitals, transpiration and financial networks will suddenly wake up on their own and start protecting the infrastructures they have so carelessly and assiduously left exposed strains credibility.

The Obama Executive Order says that the "critical infrastructure" of concern is "where a cybersecurity incident could reasonably result in catastrophic regional or national effects on public health or safety, economic security, or national security". Ok, you got me at " catastrophic ... effects". According to the dictionary that came with my Mac, "catastrophic" means "involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering". The type of things that Joel Brenner wrote about in his book "America the Vulnerable". (http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2012/010312-bradner-254473.html) Lots of people dying, the economy collapsing - fun things like that.

Right now there is no actual legal requirement that the controls for a power company's power plants be secure from hacking. There is also no personal liability for anyone working at the power company if they do not exercise common sense to try to protect against vendor stupidity that builds in security vulnerabilities. (http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/12/intruders-hack-industrial-control-system-using-backdoor-exploit/) Nor is there any liability for a vendor that purposefully decides to make their products insecure and fails to tell its customers. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/24/barracuda_backdoor/)

There are regulations that require hospitals to protect medical records (http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/) and universities to protect student educational records (http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html) but there are none that require a power company to protect its generating capacity or a hospital to protect its physical plant - which is just as important to patient care as are the records. Imagine if you will what might happen to critically ill patients in a hospital in Dallas if the AC was turned off in mid august. (http://www.scmagazine.com/texas-hospital-hacker-sentenced-to-nine-years/article/198833/) In this case the hacker went to jail but what about the hospital engineers that installed the AC controllers in such a way that they were accessible over the Internet? In my opinion they should share the blame.

The Obama effort bows to those in Congress that care less about protecting our health and safety than they care about protecting the pocketbooks of their campaign donors - and that is not only sad, it is a clear and present danger to us all. Prediction: real requirements and liability will be established in law only after a major example of why it has been needed for years - i.e. the FAA style of fatality-based regulating.

disclaimer: In spite of Harvard's feeling of self-importance I am not sure that any of its facilities would meet an objective definition of critical infrastructure, in any case I have heard no opinions from the University on this topic so the above lament about administration and Congressional impotence is my own.