Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, AT&T’s CTO
How do you solve today’s security problems on the Internet, like
viruses? Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, the CTO and CIO of AT&T, is
telling us here at the Berkman Center that we need to think again about
end-to-end:
1) You have to build intelligence into the network, especially sensors, to solve problems like viruses.
2 + 3) You have to cloak your network. PCs themselves should be cloakable.
A program that AT&T and Intel have underway will help solve that
via a chip that goes into devices and will know whether an executable
should be executed or not. AT&T Reference Chip-Set is already
in the labs. There’s a referencable out-of-band signal that helps
your PC to shut down when it needs to shut down.
Jonathan Zittrain, piped in from Oxford, wants to know: Does this offer
a tool to the policy-maker? Dr. Eslambolchi: “IANAL,” for
starters. Vonage does not have a 911 answer to nomadic activity,
he says, and that regulators make such rules as they need to do.
What is the point of the chip-set? The focus of a chip-set is to
protect the end computer to viruses and worms. The point is not
to create a v-chip.
David Weinberger and Paul Hoffert and others want to know: But what if
the word “freedom” is a virus or a worm to some government? Would
those chip-sets help such a government?
JZ wants to give the consumer the two-wheel-drive/four-wheel-drive
switch, so that you can either be in safe mode or in off-road.
Anything is possible to be built into the silicon, says Dr. Eslambolchi. It
hasn’t been designed that way. It’s meant to be for business
customers, not for ordinary customers.
