Somewhere in the Future … How Does Cyber Security Look Like?

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Throughout this article, we do not plan to tell you some fictional story, but rather to provide you with very realistic predictions for the future of cyber defence which relies on current research and development trends and a way which cyber industry makes for us. The focus of this review will be on cyber security automatic solutions which will include an intelligent software for monitoring, prevention and incident response. A human’s effort will be replaced with machine’s skills and people will be the ones who will just use benefits of such an intelligent system.

The Path We Have to Walk

The main problem with a modern cyber security is that it is still based on very passive principles. For instance, recent cyber solutions are quite good in monitoring and prevention, while they still suffer a serious lack of a good incident response. Security experts believe that an appropriate cyber defence system should provide a mix of all of three – monitoring, prevention and incident response.

What we should have in mind at this stage is that today’s security solutions are still very human-dependent and, from such a perspective, the greatest challenge for the future would be an automatic operation of cyber systems with a minimum human’s effort invested. Many researchers and software engineers forecast that the future of cyber security will rely on some sort of (security) software that will have its own self-defence capabilities.

The idea which stays behind this software is related to solution that automatically generates the patches. In other words, such a software has an ability to learn what a normal behaviour is and what an error could be and to repair itself if any vulnerability appears.

Some suggests that the path we have to walk would lead us to very sophisticated solutions which will be governed with intelligence. Such a scenario predicts a piece of code that will be capable of learning, adapting and predicting. Further, we will attempt to give a better insight on what exists on the market at the moment and to explain a course of the future discoveries and inventions.

A Self-Defending Software Already Exists

Quite recently the US research team was investigating and testing the capabilities of an intrusion prevention software (IPS). Such a software is able to protect itself from external attacks and intruders.

The testing included the list of questions which researchers carefully prepared and sent to vendors of the IPS expecting them to provide the answers and to share some of their industry experience with them. Once the research team got the response from the industry, they selected the best software for a testing in the laboratory conditions. The results suggest that a recant version of the IPS can be assumed as a good prototype of self-defending software that we will have in the future.

A theoretical background of such a solution is based on ‘automatically patching an error’ system. A current model given in [1] indicates that an automatic patching or a generating of the repair code is feasible only throughout a good learning and repairing algorithm. Some advanced studies invoke adaptive algorithms and predictive analytics as a trend in the coming times.

In general, some types of initial self-defending software already exist and as it is given in [2], they find their applications in military sector. In other words, if some testings have been made for army, we can expect that the first commercial versions of the software will appear on the market soon.

What Would Happen the Next?

In not that distant future, we can expect that a software with a self-defence mechanism governed with intelligence will become a part of our lives. General science defines intelligence as an ability to adapt to new conditions, while security sees intelligence as an information with some analysis applied. The key word here would be ‘an ability to adapt’ or ‘a capacity to track a change’.

Whatever a software of the future would appear, it will include two characteristics – an adaptivity and a self-defence. Intelligent systems are definitely something that will gain their place in the future, but what is also possible is a system with an automatic incident response.

The incident response is a big challenge of cyber security nowadays, so it’s natural that in the future such a security element will be a part of the (security) system which will need a minimum human-machine interaction.

Few Words at the End

As anything else, cyber security must get along with a change, because that’s the only certain thing in the future. In such a case, it is necessary to rely on intelligence, so what we need to do is to think in multidisciplinary manner and to try to connect everything with everything as the ‘Internet of things’ concept suggests. That’s how we can get ready for the coming days.

References:

[1] Ernst M., Self-defending software: Automatically patching errors in deployed software, Lecture notes, University of Washington, 2009
[2] Kerivan, J.E., Brothers, K., Self-defending security software, Military Communications Conference (2005 MILCOM), IEEE, 2005