Feds Move to Secure Net

An anonymous reader writes "eWeek reports:The Cyber Warning Information Network, a key part of the Bush administration's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, will use a secure, private IP network separate from the public Internet, according to officials. The government currently has seven nodes running, said Marcus Sachs, director of communications infrastructure protection at the Office of Cyberspace Security, in Washington."

Comments

Re:I would hope so

[MnO-Raphael]

Physical separation of networks _is_ widely used among government and military networks. The reason being very simple: It's the only cost-effective way to guarantee security.

However, even if you lease a private line it would still be in control of a third party, the telephone company for instance. In these cases cryptographic hardware is used to secure the channel.

Re:So how will they get data in/out ?

[gbjbaanb]

almost certainly there will be hosts solely connected to the private network, and never to the public. No doubt this can work for the government who will not allow just anyone to plug a new host in. (perhaps they have a single hosts file ;-)

I think they cannot implement a truly secure solution over the public net as the protocols were never designed with security in mind - ie. anything that happens is a hack or a bodge on top of those insecure protocols. Whilst these may be good enough for you or me in practical terms, the government would want a quantifiably secure system, and the only way you get that is to disconnect yourself from the rest of the world.

There are plenty of systems that do this BTW - I used to work for a company that did credit card processing. They had a single PC connected to the internet and not the lan, all the others were on the internal lan only. I've seen banks not connect to the internet at all.

Thank god I work for a less paranoid company now!