John Pescatore

In case you are wondering why the Google logo today is a bunch of multicolored dots and dashes, today is the birthday of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, inventor of the telegraph. Well, even though Morse did obtain a patent for the telegraph, inventor is a strong word – Morse was more of an integrator. He pulled together concepts from many other’s point technology efforts to put together a working means to communicate at (almost) the speed of light.

The history of telegraphy has a lot of analogies to the growth of the Internet and there are a lot of security analogies as well:

• Denial of service – cut the wire, and telegraphy stopped. Solution multiple wires.
• Privacy – attach to the wire and you can hear everything. Military use of the telegraph in the 1860’s used substitution ciphers for privacy.
• TEMPEST – If you were close to the sender or the receiver, you could hear the key clicks and decode the message. Solution: physical security and soundproofing.
• Consumerization - In the US, the government funded the first test of the telegraph, but left it to private industry to grow the use of the technology. Chaos, regulation, de-regulation, more chaos followed.

The list goes on.

Coincidentally, Guglielmo Marconi’s birthday was April 25th, just a few days (though many years) from Morse’s. It took about 40 years after Morse’s establishment of telegraphy, but once Marconi demonstrated how radio waves could be use to carry information, the seeds of everyone to everyone global connectivity (without centralized control) were planted. From there it took about another 60 years to the development of shared medium approaches like ALOHAnet and packetized approaches to come along and pave the way for the Internet. Then almost 30 years for the first HTTP browser to move the Internet from scientists to schoolkids.

By the way, mixed in the middle of that history are some important security milestones. In 1976/1977, both public key cryptography (Diffie Hellman) and symmetric key cryptography (DES) were formally established.In 1995, el Gamal at Netscape came up with SSL. 

If you run all this through some sophisticated data smoothing algorithms, it looks like every 25 years on average there will be a major perturbation on the offensive and defensive sides. The defensive side needs to use the next ten years to gain some ground…