One of the best kept secrets in any government is incompetency. What I mean by this, is that despite your feelings on current political affairs, there will always be some sort of hole in a government’s defenses or general strategy but they will never let the world at large know, because by default that means they are losing. This will be present in all aspects of government, as funding can never truly reach far enough, and only with large sums of money can these agencies afford the experts needed find such vulnerabilities. The lucky few that are funded to the moon (and no, I don’t mean the agencies that would actually take us to the moon) still suffer from the secrecy surrounding them. The more secret they are, the less eyes there are to find issues. Even experts will have limited access to the latest governmental projects, and that could mean danger during deployment of said operations. The Air Force is one such example, but is hoping to change the tides. At 2020’s DEF CON, the Air Force once again welcomed hackers to attack their tech, hoping to discover vulnerabilities that they may have overlooked.
Zack Whittaker wrote for TechCrunch about this issue, and how the Air Force is looking to open up in order to create a more secure system. There is a clean summation of the issue posed by Will Roper, who is the assistant secretary of the Air Force. Roper said that “Just because you’re not telling the world about your vulnerabilities doesn’t mean you’re secure to go to war”. It’s this level of secrecy that all governments hold dearly that many times is their undoing. While at passing glance it may seem like a full proof plan, keeping a very select group of eyes on a project or piece of technology that may one day need to save millions of people is largely a bad one. The position the Air Force is taking, now, is one of needing help. While it may seem centralized to fixing bugs in the current systems, there is a larger mission “to shore up its supply chain to prevent introducing new bugs” by letting hackers in. The initiative, named “Hack-a-Sat” will be in place to hopefully find and prevent bugs before the enemy does. While DEF CON, who would essentially host the Hack-a-Sat event, may be cancelled due to the current pandemic the event will likely still be held remote. Roper hopes that this event, and the one that preceded it last year which allowed a similar scenario of hackers getting to toy around with an F-15 jet, will unify the security technology and hacker communities.
Despite the assumed differences in motives and priorities, many hackers do truly only want to find vulnerabilities. There are of course large numbers of malicious hackers, but to throw away the hackers that are talented in exposing security flaws and do it for just such a reason and nothing else is foolish. I’m glad that the government, even if only one section of it, is eager to work with said group, as putting aside differences for the security and safety of a country is something that you would hope to occur within the government more often. Unsurprisingly, Whittaker mentions that during the first attempt at this where the hackers were tasked with tearing apart a F-15, the results were astounding as they found a “ton of vulnerabilities”. Not only do these types of events increase interest in cyber security, they also would potentially decrease the desire for hackers to act maliciously as the idea of hacking for good (and for a legitimate paycheck) increases. Overall, a win-win-win. The government gets some much needed help, the hackers get a chance to show what they’ve got, and the people can feel inspired as the community works together with what typically feels like a completely foreign entity due to the general secrecy around the Air Force. Hopefully the trend continues, and while it may not lead to open-source government technology, it may certainly help prevent fiascos, such as another COBOL crisis that we currently face due to an outdated language being used for unemployment check deployment, by letting more experts into a typically closed off world.
Source Article: https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/22/air-force-hack-satellite/
Social Structures & Algorithms 