Author Archives: C. Warren Axelrod

Global Cybersecurity Standards … Another Plea

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“The Editor’s Letter,” in the May 2017 issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM) by Moshe Y Vardi is about “Cyber Insecurity and Cyber Libertarianism.” The column is available at https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/5/216316-cyber-insecurity-and-cyber-libertarianism/fulltext# Vardi’s column recognizes the deficiencies in cybersecurity that I’ve been harping on for years. He writes the following: “So here we are, 70 years […]

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Cybersecurity Risk Model … Implicit or Explicit Consensus?

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Whenever you engage with an online vendor or service, you must first click on the “Agree” button to indicate that you will honor the stated terms and conditions mandated by the site owner. Most individuals click the “Agree” button without thinking, knowing that activating the “Don’t Agree” button will result in your not being able […]

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Taxing Computers and Robots … Revisited

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There have been quite a few recent articles that suggest taxing robots and using the collected funds to ease the negative impact of job losses and to train workers in modern technologies (particularly cybersecurity, in my opinion). One such article is Kevin J. Delaney’s “The robot that takes your job should pay taxes, says Bill […]

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Security and Safety Co-Engineering Revisited

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There are those who denigrate such websites as ResearchGate and Academia.edu because they are for-profit, which is a discussion that I will not get into here. If this particular argument is of interest to you, you should read the Discover magazine piece “Who Isn’t Profiting Off the Backs of Researchers” by Jon Tennant posted on […]

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Cybersecurity’s “Forward to the Past”

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On June 21, 2017, Congress received a letter from 103 eminent cybersecurity experts and researchers (the list was compiled by NEDC (The National Election Defense Coalition) and partners) about reducing election hacking risks. You can link to the letter via Zack Wittaker’s article “Security experts warn lawmakers of election hacking risks” posted on June 21, […]

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AI Systems’ Security and Safety … A No-Brainer?

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The June 2017 issue of IEEE Spectrum is devoted to comparing AI (artificial intelligence) systems to the human brain. It is a special report containing eight articles under the umbrella of “Can We Copy the Brain?” We must ask whether this a reasonable endeavor? Will it give us a better understanding as to how to […]

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AI Systems’ Security and Safety … A No-Brainer?

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The June 2017 issue of IEEE Spectrum is devoted to comparing AI (artificial intelligence) systems to the human brain. It is a special report containing eight articles under the umbrella of “Can We Copy the Brain?” We must ask whether this a reasonable endeavor? Will it give us a better understanding as to how to […]

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Conflict vs. Consensus Cybersecurity Risk Models

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I gave a presentation at the end of April 2017 on “A Consensus Model for Optimizing Privacy, Secrecy, Security and Safety” at the IEEE Homeland Security Technology Conference. The topic occurred to me when reading a quote by Brookings Institute Fellow, Susan Hennessey, as follows: “We could set up our laws to reject surveillance outright, […]

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Protecting In-Vehicle, Vehicle-to-Vehicle, and Ex-Vehicle Systems

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On May 5, 2017, I gave a presentation with the title “Cybersecurity in the Age of Autonomous Vehicles, Intelligent Traffic Controls and Pervasive Transportation Networks,” for which I was honored with the “Best Applications Track Paper” award, at the IEEE Long Island Systems, Applications and Technology (LISAT) Conference. The basic premise of my presentation is […]

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Campaign Lessons Learned—Part 3: Authenticity, Authority and Access

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From the cybersecurity professionals’ point of view, identity and access management (IAM) is really all a matter of authenticity, authorization and access permissions. Similarly, if the origin of a news item or blog or comment can be traced to a provably authoritative source, then it is more likely to be taken to be true than […]

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