A New Cyber Angle: Differential Traceability

August 20, 2018

Let’s start the week with a bit of jargon: differential traceability.”

How do you separate the bad eggs from the good online? It’s a question we’ve all been wracking our brains to solve ever since the first email was sent. However, the stakes have grown incredibly higher since those innocent days. Recently, some very bright minds have begun digging deeply into the idea of traceability as a way to track down internet offenders and it’s gaining traction, as we discovered from a Communications of the ACM editorial entitled: “Traceability.”

According to the story, it all comes down to differential traceability:

“The ability to trace bad actors to bring them to justice seems to me an important goal in a civilized society. The tension with privacy protection leads to the idea that only under appropriate conditions can privacy be violated. By way of example, consider license plates on cars. They are usually arbitrary identifiers and special authority is needed to match them with the car owners.”

Giving everyone a tag, much like a car, for Internet traffic is an interesting idea. However, much like real license plates, the only ones who will follow the rules will be the ones who aren’t trying to break them.

This phrase meshes nicely with Australia’s proposed legislation to attach fines to specific requests for companies to work around encryption. Cooperate and there is no fine. Fail to cooperate, the company could be fined millions per incident.

Differential? A new concept.

Patrick Roland, August 20, 2018

Comments

One Response to “A New Cyber Angle: Differential Traceability”

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