Computer Security: an endless war between hacker and network administrator

Computer security is always a big concern for those who use computers inside a network, from the smallest scale home network, to the huge national wide network. In the following, I would like to share my knowledge about the high-tech battle between hacker and network administrator in different scale. 

The smallest computer network that we used daily is our home network, most of which are wireless with a router and based on WIFI protocol. In the early days when home networks were just introduced, people set up the wireless network without a password. In this way, your neighborhood might be able to use your network to surf on the internet. That might not sound bad, especially if you are a generous person. However, if some personal photos or important documents can also be released in this way, you might need to seriously think about the security issue of the home network. A safe and practical way is to add an access password to your home network, which might be set based on your router. However, if your password is very simple, then it will be easily decoded by some kind of machine available on Ebay. One solution is to improve your password to be more complex. A safer way is to provide a white list which contains the unique network card ID’s of all devices that you have. In this way, no password needed and it will be very hard to hack, while it brings with a little troublesome if you want to share your home network to a guest.

The medium size computer network might be the intranet used inside a company or an institute. Since most companies have lots of confidential data which should not be released to outside without permission. In this way, they need to have stringent control on the network access to these data. On the other hand, companies will need to provide a good network environment to support co-work and communications among their employee and customers. Therefore, an open network is also needed for companies. The two contradictory requirements bring big challenges for network administrators. A kind of software named firewall is commonly used to monitor the network activities of the whole company network, and will report alarms when unauthorized visits are identified. However, hackers have developed many tools to bypass the firewall by using some bugs of the network systems and obtained the administrator right to do some hacking and peep at the confidential data. A better way to protect company data is to physically quarantine the high-confidential data from the outside network. In this way, hacker can’t find any ways to attack the network from outside. A good example is the computer network system to control the nuclear plant in Iran, which used physical isolation for security issues. It is still not unassailable, since the isolated network itself is still vulnerable to attacks. Some reports showed that the network has been attached from internal, which are done by some Special Forces soldiers who dive into the plan and uploaded the virus to the network system.

Ref: Inside a Cyber War Room: The Fight Against Hacking,  
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100716315

The biggest size network will be the national wide or even earth wide network, like the well-known internet. Basically, it is open to the whole people on the planet. However, each nation has its rules for the data exposed on the internet, and more and more nations have a special network troop to handle the attacks on the network from other countries to some critical department and also organize similar attacks to other countries. Put a pirate flag on the top of some public website might not trouble the user a lot, while disable the bank system of a country will be a much bigger issue and its results might be equal to a real war. In this way, national wide network security is highly emphasized by most government and there will be a long term war in this field.

 

Artificial Intelligence: a good assistant in daily life

Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating term in computer science. I believe that to let computer have the intelligence as a human being is the dreams to many CS people from day one they involve in this science field. With many years’ research and practices in this field, computers are becoming much smarter than before. Here, I would like to discuss some good applications of AI in today’s real life and my opinions for AI’s tomorrow.

It might not be known by many people that AI technology has already been used widely and people can find the track of it everywhere. One famous example is Siri (as with several latest versions of iPhone by Apple), which will turn your mobile phone to be a magic box that is able to talk to you and answer any of your questions. Although Siri is not perfect to deal with many hard questions and some strange replies are appearing now and then, it does bring better user experience with your phone in a more “human” way. Beside the necessary support from infrastructure improvement such as cloud computing, AI is the critical technology to enable this. AI will not only do help during human voice analysis and understanding, but also help search the correct answer from the internet and compose voice to express the answer back to users. 

reference: Where Is Technology Going To Take Us Next? 

If you are amazed about the intelligence of Siri, then you might not notice that there might be an even smarter AI that most people are using every day. Yes, it is Google. Behind many Google’s products, such as Google search engine, Google AD, Google map, there is a powerful “brain” behind to let Google’s service meet your requirement in the right way. By learning the huge amount of data from customers and on the internet, Google’s AI brain is accumulating knowledge in a fast way and has already be the most knowledgeable guy in the world and serve different kinds of requests around the world in a fast way. The brain is built up by “deep learning” technology, which is one of the fast developing technology in AI fields. Deep learning means that the more inputs to the brain, the smarter that the brain will be since it keeps learning from input data.

With the help of AI, computers are more like human beings and can take charge of many affairs that are done before by people. However, I believe that the final target of AI is not to totally replace or fully simulate people’s brain, but will be a strong enhancement to part of the brain’s functions that will do benefit to us. For example, a computer with human like mood will not be useful and might even be dangerous since it is hard to control.  We need AI to help understand the nature, such as to identify the valuable knowledge from big data and assist people to make critical decisions based on data analysis, while we don’t want AI to peep at everybody’s privacy and release to others. We want AI to be a smart guy while more important is to be a nice guy first.

History of computer science: penetrating into personal life

Computer, when it is first developed more than 60 years before, is a giant monster which takes over the big area with several rooms of diodes and connecting wires. Today, computers can be found in every home and anywhere, even in your wrist watch or glasses. The fast progresses of computer hardware provide computer science good opportunities to penetrate into personal life in everywhere.

 

Reference from http://www.electronicproducts.com/Computer_Peripherals/There_can_be_only_one_device.aspx

In the earlier stage of computer science, the emphasis is on the automation of industry manufacturing and big engineering projects. You might know that the first computer is designed to aid calculating the rocket track to be more accurate. The quickly increasing demands on more precise instruments and more efficient product lines contribute to the big power of the development of computer science. Computer scientists around the world have developed countless of computational solutions to develop smart Robot to perform complex manufacturing actions in Automobile assembly line, and developed the extensible network model to populate information around the world with internet. Although these progresses in computer science haven’t directly interactive with humans’ daily life, it did profound impacts to our approaches for changing the world. With more and more automation adopted in various industries, people’s ability to create is largely improved.

With the popularization of personal computers, computing resources are easily obtained by each person. How to aid people to better handle important affairs in their daily life and work is the new motivation to computer science. The invention of Office Kits like Microsoft Office software largely improved people’s productivities in editing and publications. It also let the paperless office to be possible and save lots of natural resources. The same time, computer science has large progress in graphical computations and brought us vivid 3-dimensional animations which are hard to tell which is real or not. With innovative research in human-computer interface, computing resources are becoming much easier to normal people who don’t have professional knowledge in computer science.  Cloud computing and mobile computing are two recent big breakthroughs in computer science, which help to equip small mobile devices with the powerful computing ability to aid people’s daily life by the most convenient way. 

Computer science is still a flourishing field with lots of potentials to be identified. As a student in statistics, I also wish to take the benefit of the big achievements in computer science and combine statistical analysis methods with powerful computing algorithms to explore valuable unknowns beneath the big data.