The Mathematical Sciences' Role in Homeland Security Proceedings of a Workshop (2004) / Chapter Skim
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Opening Remarks and Discussion, April 27
Opening Remarks and Discussion, April 27
Pages 367-393
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367 Opening Remarks and Discussion, April 27 Transcript of Presentation 367
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It is considerably warmer on that side of the room, so if you are freezing, you can do your own temperature control by just moving from one side of the room to the other, if we haven't gotten the heating or cooling system working properly in here, which it seems like we haven't, actually, given the way the room feels. The purpose of this session, which I was just told a few minutes ago that I am chairing, is just to try to summarize what we talked about yesterday.
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A lot of mathematicians who haven't made contributions to these kinds of efforts in the past want to make contributions in the future, so we need a research agenda and we don't want to do what mathematicians sometimes do, which is just make up a problem and then write in the beginning of your NSF proposal that this is relevant to such-and-such. We really want to talk to people in the field to find out what their real problems are, and set a research agenda for the community that people who are interested can get involved in.
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We think of ourselves as being part of a system that involves equipment, people, processes, and we want to improve our overall security process, and 370
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One of the things that I want to avoid is people thinking I have this mathematical algorithm that I am going to use to solve problems of homeland security, or this mathematical theorem that I have just proved is going to solve homeland security. What you want to do is look for aspects of that system that can be improved.
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There are mathematical challenges in analyzing a system, breaking it into sub-systems, issues of modelling pieces of the system and how they interact, and different resolutions. I can model the economy at the macro level by flows of currency, or I can look at individual micro -- I forget the name of the person who gave the talk yesterday, where he was talking about the agent simulations.
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I think Kathy has described the short term interactions which could benefit directly homeland security. On the other hand, we had yesterday a longer term question, which would be called for not only by the homeland security concerns, but more generally by society.
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It is effective sometimes, but I know your names. But seriously, I think that one of the ways in which the mathematics community moves, since we are a fairly conservative community, is that we are energized by some of the federal agencies putting funds in various places.
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My own program in applied mathematics, I can see a number of the issues that we talked about yesterday being relevant to that. We have a program called computational methods for statistics and probability that I think would also be very, very response to proposals in these areas.
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That is a relatively new vehicle, research groups in mathematical sciences. We are currently beginning the process of recommending awards in the third round.
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Now, in terms of when proposals come in, we are in the process of putting together our new solicitation for that right now. I would expect that the required letters of intent would be coming in sometime in August, and the proposals would be due sometime in mid-September, so there would be sufficient time.
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At the reception we were talking about that a little bit, and Sally actually brought up some really good examples of historically where this has been done in the areas that started out with some problems, probably equally vague to some degree as what we are talking about in the homeland security. So Sally, do you want to comment on some of that?
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So that would be a month's worth of work, but you could do that in a relatively short term. That is what happened with the foot and mouth epidemic in the U.K.
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I'm sure many of you know, there is a new math institute at Bamf that is a collaboration of PINS, which is the Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and MSRI. It has some NSF funding, highly leveraged NSF funding.
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There is a huge element of statistics in that, but I think that a lot of us realize that stat has a huge place in homeland security. One of the things that I would like to see more discussion of is how other areas of mathematics, especially core mathematics, are necessary to solve some of these problems.
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He was at Microsoft, running the security for Microsoft until he went to the White House a few months ago. It is Microsoft's loss, but hopefully it is cyber securityls gain.
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After I asked everyone give me some little talking points on your bias and everything, I am probably going to let them do it, because I think I would not do them justice by introducing them my way, so I would like to have them do it themselves. In that vein, as we go through the session this morning, I would like to start out just framing some of the things we are looking at from the White House perspective in this area.
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So with that, let me talk about some of the things that the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board is looking at as priorities, and then turn it over to my distinguished colleagues here. First and foremost, one of the things that we find to be in short supply is awareness.
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The National Science Foundation administers it. I think our biggest customer thus far has been the Department of Defense, where they allocate funds through NSF to scholarships to people in advanced degree programs in information assurance, information security.
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There is a true belief, at least in the government circle, and I think it is shared by some of my colleagues, I know when I was in the private sector, many of us talked about it, that there 386
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That is the domain name servers and border gateway protocols. If you are not familiar with this aspect of it, the domain name servers are those things, when you type in a name, it is converted to a number, when then identifies your address on the Internet.
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Many times it is done in unclear text. We see in this, particularly going back to the illustration I mentioned about career -- one of the things I cited was being able to create denial of service attacks as a result of it.
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There has been a lot of discussion of late -- this is a little bit notes here, but there has been a security is going to trump privacy. I oftentimes get asked, of a digression from my lot of discussion that where we are going to level?
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It makes business sense, but it doesn't make security sense. Not only do we have directly accessible from the Internet, but we are finding some that are saying, no, we don't have any addressable space on the Internet, and you find out that they have digital control systems connected to an internal administrative LAN which is then connected to the Internet on the other side, which translates into, they are addressable from the Internet.
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When we talk to some of the people that are involved in the technology designing some of these things - this is something that maybe you all can collectively help with -- they say, we would like to do more. But what happens is, even if we are looking to do a simple thing like authentication a digital control system, when we are talking nanosecond switching time, there is no way to authenticate something and still do the switching in an appropriate manner.
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Many of the switching controls, for example, in the power grid are based on very, very slight fluctuations in electrical usage that would cause the entire system to switch over to another grid to provide power. Those are the sort of instantaneous controls that need to be switched, but there has also got to be the ability to do them on an authenticated mechanism.
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So with that, I took this about what we and other opportunity to talk concerned about in framing a broad perspective, before I turn it over to my distinguished colleagues to talk about their concerns . Thank you very much.
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