Physical Data Security

Why a complete loss of trust in online security is the best thing that can happen to the modern world.

The internet has been around for decades. It connects digital devices and allows them to share information. As time goes on, more and more internet-connected devices will appear in our daily lives, collecting ever more information and transferring more of it more frequently. 

It is generally assumed that owners of the devices are aware of the information being collected and have control over how it is used. A third party should not gain access to the data, whether it is on the device or after it has been transmitted over the internet. 

WhatsApp's efforts to protect its users

The importance of security is proportional to the value of the information being stored and transmitted. Controlling access to your WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, for example, becomes much more important when you have compromising photos or intimate messages on there. 

As the world economy continues on its path of digitization, greater amounts of wealth will be tied up in information stored on internet-connected devices. Having a million dollars stolen from a company is a loss equal to losing a company secret worth a million dollars on a laptop. 

However, internet security has been continuously eroded over the decades and there is a forseeable future where no security can be expected for digital devices. 

Internet security is at an end

It starts with us.

The general consumer is not fully aware of all the information collected on them by their devices. Voice-activated tools such as Amazon Echo or Apple's Siri record our conversations through a smartphone's active microphone, internet service providers log your browsing history for sale while modern cities take thousands of photographs of you parking your car, exiting the metro or walking in the park, every day. 

Facebook's face recognition.

We do not fully control how this information is used or transmitted either. You can be tagged on Facebook despite never having registered an account, your browsing history is sold to travel agencies and insurance companies certainly have access to more data than you willingly shared.    

Without knowledge or control, each device we own and use is a vector of attack for a third party. If the value we accord all of our personal data is commensurate with that of more tangible objects, it would be akin to dropping photocopies of our passports, social security numbers and family albums everywhere we went.

Usually, we as citizens defer to the government and law enforcement to protect us from attacks. If your home is broken into and robbed, you would call the police, report the crime and have investigators collect evidence to track down the criminals. This protection should extend to your data.

But what if the government is supportive of measures that erode security and enhance the effectiveness of attacks to further its own goals?

Examples include the UK's stance on internet security and privacy, or the USA's anti-terrorism and ISP laws. These measures actively weaken the defences we rely upon to protect our security and help private actors collect and distribute data we did not agree to share. Together, the personal lives of consumers and the wealth of companies is put at risk.

One method of encryption. 

The commonly proposed solutions to these security deficiencies is education and encryption. Education is how we learn about how attacks take place, which vulnerabilities they exploit and how the public and the private sector should behave to make these attacks less probably. Encryption is a sometimes cumbersome, sometimes expensive way of rendering data unusable to attackers even if it is extracted or intercepted. Insufficient encryption is as good as no encryption at all, so there is an incentive to use the best available cryptology.    

When this is at stake, we take measures to protect our data.

The best encryption works by scrambling the data in way that an attacker would take hundreds to thousands of years to piece it back together. There is a technology however that can do this in minutes.

Using quantum encoders to encrypt communications. 

Quantum computing has so far been a niche product, used mostly for testing and experimenting in computer science laboratories. Soon, it will realize its potential. It promises to explore many potential solutions for any problem simultaneously through quantum superposition and entanglement. The first consequence of this is the ability to solve any encryption in a matter of seconds, where a conventional computer would struggle endlessly. 

Like all other forms of computing, quantum processors will become widespread in use. Unlocking the world's digital secrets and cracking previously impregnable data forts containing millions in virtual value will make quantum decoding enticing to criminals, governments and their combination, black operations, alike. Quantum-based encryption can easily be disrupted.

Until then, there is are still problems with conventional encryption. Stronger encryption means a computer takes longer to secure a piece of data, and equally long to decrypt it for reading. As the threats facing data security become more numerous while data becomes more valuable, it will take ever longer to secure data to the point where encryption consumes more resources than encoding, compressing, storing, transmitting or even generating the data.  

The last bastion of digital security

One option to maintain data secure is to remove and separate data from the internet. 

If no-one touches the computer, data is secure. 

Virtual private networks can be seen as small-scale replicas of the wider internet, connected only at endpoints to transmit instructions and data in a more secure manner. 

Even better, 'air-gap' computers or networks cannot be connected to remotely. They are the primary form of protection for sensitive data used by governments around the world. Without any connection to another device, there are no vectors of attack... right?

We will now discuss a world in the near future where vulnerable consumers, spying governments and quantum code-breakers have together rendered internet security an oxymoron. How will it look like? How will a digitalized economy function? What are the solutions and consequences?

The components of physical security

An electronic device secluded from all connections still needs to transmit and receive data. It must also be protected against the ultimate attack: a hacker in direct contact with the device. 

The consequence of these two requirements is that a certain level of physical security must be maintained. By physical security, it is meant that no one other than authorized agents may approach and use the device. 

The components of physical security are therefore:

-Location/Case

-Agents

-Exit point

-Temporary storage device

-Transport

-Entry point

The location component involved protecting the area where the device is stored or worked upon from intrusion. Walls, locks, guards and surveillance are the norm. The same applies to the device's casing if it must be mobile. The protection must also extend to sonic and electromagnetic leaks for reasons explained below.

Agents are the humans that work for the company and are directly or indirectly in contact with the device. Vetting, trust and incentives are ways of ensuring that the people working for the company will not be tempted to compromise security. Although the 'human factor' is usually considered a weakpoint in secure systems, they are in this case more reliable than automated agents, especially in combination with biometric data.

Exit point is where the data contained in the device is copied into the temporary storage medium. It is an opening for attackers to intercept data leaving the device. 

The temporary storage device can be as simple as a USB stick or as complex as quantum entangled photons set to collapse if tampered with. It must keep its data secure during transport and remain immune to parasitic attacks that try to use it to intercept the data at the entry and exit points. The temporary criteria is so that no trace of the data remains after the task is complete.

Transport is how the temporary storage device is physically moved from the exit to entry points. Physically moving data prevents it from being compromised on the internet or intercepted by most forms of government regulation. This is a critical component of overall security and will likely function as a 'physical net' between devices. Compromises have to be made to maintain a useful data transfer speed, so this might end up being the only weakpoint of a secure system.

Entry point. The destination of the data. Care must be taken to verify that the temporary storage device has not been compromised and that the data has not been modified or corrupted while in transit. Quantum computing can be used here to run through the data received to weed out any hacking tools included intentionally or not very quickly. 

Why this could be a great opportunity

The list of components of physical security might sound like a massive task that would force an undue burden on a digitized economy. How would a company compete if every computer must be kept under lock and key, and if it must absolutely trust every employee working for it? Would this cause the collapse of the data-reliant systems we depend on to produce wealth?

Not at all! In fact, a reversion to the absolute necessity of physical security is a great opportunity for a new phase in society and a solution to many of the problems caused by increased automation. 

Consider this: today's society relies more and more on data handling systems that are entirely virtual, producing value stored only as 1s and 0s, and eliminating human intervention at every turn. Automation and artificial intelligence cut into the human workforce without recourse while concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Online activity means that server farms, corporate headquarters, company employees and data centers can be located anywhere on the globe, which promotes cherry-picking of the most exploitable characteristics available: cheap IT from India, low latency in New York, cold climates in Greenland and low taxes in Ireland. 

How would things change if physical security was the only way to maintain this empire?

Humans would become important again. They are the guarantors that data is secure. Transportation will have to improve and many concepts such as supersonic air travel become viable again. Localization becomes paramount: companies will have to make hard choices as to where they want to operate and to dedicate their efforts. Less work will be outsourced, more companies will install complete headquarters in their areas of operation: money will stay where it is generated.

It does not necessarily mean the end of the internet either. As mentioned before, insufficient encryption is as good as no encryption... so why not openly transmit information you can afford to 'lose' to enemy hands? 

What we might end up with is a tiered security strategy. The lowest tier is as secure as the radio: broadly transmitted information over existing infrastructure. This will contain the bulk of consumer data use, such as Youtube videos or web pages. Intercepting this information is as easy as it is pointless, as it will have very little value. 

The highest tier is the Maginot Line of data. Billion dollar weapons programs, drug research and financial data are kept in hermetic bunkers. People are moved around to work on the data instead of risking the data being moved. The security investment will be immense, with the money moving into reinvigorated sectors such as air transport, security contractors and spy agencies. 

In short:
-Increased human value
-Localization of investments
-Potential shield against the effects of automation
-Increased investment in sectors neutered by telecommunications
-Run-on effects of increased mobility (hotels, restaurants, property markets...)

Further discussion of particular effects below.

Air gaps and countermeasures

In networking, an air-gap is a physical isolation of a computer from any external network. No wires, waves or any forms of communication can access these devices from the outside. 

Is sufficient control is exercised on what data goes in, then an air-gapped computer cannot be infiltrated. Protocols put into place to prevent unwanted persons and careless behaviour can prevent information from leaking out through unauthorized access.

All it takes is one un-vetted USB to compromise an air-gapped computer. 

However, even such a system is not impregnable. Deceiving the human operators can permit certain programs to be installed on these computers. The physical security can be penetrated. A resourceful attacker might even sidestep the problem by pre-installing spyware on all devices likely to be used in an air-gapped network, a tactic likely employed by governments today against Microsoft OS systems. 

A famous example is the Stuxnet case. It was the largest malware project ever, involving the development of a computer worm meant to take down or severely handicap the development of the Iranian nuclear program. The problem is, the computers that controlled the uranium refineries were air-gapped and isolated from the outside world... until a combination of spy work, social engineering and international co-operation penetrated these defences. 

Newer tools are constantly being devised. The most effective tools attempt to extract information from a computer through passive 'sniffing' of internal electromagnetic leaks, or ex-filtrate it from an infected computer through sound, power spike, screen defects and so on.

This phone's FM radio is listening to signals generated by the infected computer's GPU.

Most importantly, the case highlights the fact that the critical factor to penetrating air gaps is to have human agents working for you, physically or facilitating the physical access of malware into the protected environment. Designing defences against human attack is much more intuitive and straightforwards than cyber defences, which is a good outcome for writers and worldbuilders who want to set out exciting scenarios for the audience. 

Biometrics

Trust only goes so far. 

You might trust your closest friends or people who have invested as much into a project as you have. This circle of trust cannot be extended to cover all the employees of a large corporation or multi-million dollar projects, as it involves a rotating roster of hundreds of individuals.

The technological solution to the problem of trust is identification. 

UK passport with biometric chip.

Modern identification relies on certification: documents that assure you that the person in front of you really is who they claim, on the authority of the certifying body.

The problem with this approach is that certificates are a real-world object protected by encryption. Today's governments are aware that breaking the security of the documents or the certifying body through cyber attack allows the attackers to create documents proving they are whoever they want them to be. This has resulted in a push for biometric data to be included on passports.

Different sorts of biometric data in use today.

In a future where physical security is the last line of defense, biometrics will be intensely developed. Instead of fingerprints and DNA swabs, less easily falsifiable data such as brain wave scans, heartbeat audio recordings, infra-red snapshots and even body odour will be included in databases. 

It is quite difficult to replicate any of this data and fool a scanner, but impossible to do so for all of them combined. 

Of course, biometrics alone are insufficient as a form of protection. It cannot determine that the person has been turned into an attack vector by a third party, nor can it prevent situations where attackers completely bypass the verification checkpoints. There's also the problem of the reference database for the biometric profiles being a weakpoint for the entire system and that the users must trust that the data handlers will not use personal data for nefarious purposes.  

De-centralization and isolation

Having to rely on the physical transport of data to ensure its security increases the cost of communications for any project or company that operate in more than one location. 

Businesses will try to reduce this cost by decreasing the frequency and cost of these communications, both by increasing the independence of each site and the distance the data travels. By independence, it is meant the ability for local headquarters to make decisions without consulting higher-level management, or a research team to have all its resources pooled nearby and other similar cases.

The proper term for all this is de-centralization.

It would be interesting to have many more Apple Campus 2 buildings around the world.

Just as companies will start building larger, more self-sufficient regional centers, governments will relegate more power to local authorities and consumers will prefer to pay their taxes, do their banking and buy their products near where they live.  

There are positive and negative effects to de-centralization.

De-centralization is an added layer of security on its own, as an attack cannot easily propagate to other data centers. It is a trend that the internet is returning to through the use of block-chain technology. 

Job markets will lose the volatility and insecurity that came with very mobile employees and the possibility of outside hires. On a national level, having large companies replicating the full corporate structure wherever they go prevents them from 'sniping' regional advantages without giving anything in return. More importantly, this means that money sticks wherever it is produced and actually helps back regions that provide lower wages or tax breaks instead of putting local populations in conflict with commercial interests. By the same token, there is much less advantage to simply expand companies instead of improving their performance. Multiple, small enterprises will compete with billion-dollar value brands on the same footing, leading to more innovation, more product choice and higher quality products for each price point. This only helps consumers. 

Most of the world's trade happens between a handful of financial centers.

On the other hand, de-centralization means corporations lose out on the savings of single-center administration. Solutions to problems the company faces will be varied and sometimes contradictory, so this will increase running costs. Small companies becoming very competitive will cause large companies to very carefully research their investment opportunities and still hesitate: money will flow more slowly. Higher quality services and products cost more to make without the savings of global data sharing, so profit margins will be lower and only lean and mean marketing strategies will become successful. For the consumer, this can be seen as every product being aggressively pushed into every ad space and air time. Family businesses will suffer despite being fully local and while the local job market will become more favourable to employees, it will hurt developed countries' economies in favour of developing countries.  

Transport and temporary storage devices

Data will need to be moved to be useful.
As mentioned before, storage devices will be loaded with data and transported between exit and entry points to maintain the chain of physical security.

No reason for this trend to end.

A common temporary storage device is a USB stick: a removable flash drive. It is small, can hold a lot of data and cannot be accessed wirelessly. Due to its small size, it is cheap to add electromagnetic protection, such as faraday cages to prevent the drive from being wiped by an EMP attack, and physical protection, such as a steel box to prevent the drive from being destroyed by a car crash.

The list of security requirements and the level of protection required will grow with the value of the data. Extremely sensitive data, such as weapon blueprints, state secrets or trading algorithms have two routes for physical transport.

The first is already used today: security through secrecy. 
There is no need to carry your USB stick in a metal cage if no-one knows you have it. There is not need to add protections if your data is being carried in a chip hidden the screw cap of a pen you negligently dropped next a stranger in a train station...

Armored convoy.

The second is to insure the protection of the data yourself. It is not a task you can delegate or assign blame for, like car insurance, because by then the data would be lost in an attack and no amount of money will bring it back. This means that valuable data is carried at your own cost, however much you can afford.

For high-value data, this might take the form of armored convoys travelling down special street lanes and authorized to use lethal force. 

Naturally, such a show of force will cost a lot. In most cases, moving the people who use the data, instead of the data itself, will be a more economical measure. De-centralization already means that the engineers or scientists that use the data would live near their place of work. Massive investments on short-distance point-to-point transport of people is to be expected. 

Elon Musk's Boring company is an example of such an investment.

This might spur the development of transport solutions such as road trains or fleets of autonomous cars. These are much less costly than expanding underground rail or adding multi-level roads to handle the traffic. 

Another concern is speed.

A USB stick in your pocket can only travel as fast as you do. A fully developed intercity transport network would not have an effect on travel speeds beyond city boundaries.

Gigabit transfer rates on two wheels.

High-speed communications are still possible in a physically secure world. The trick is to take a lot of data and carry it quickly where it needs to go. For example, a 100 terabyte hard-drive carried across a city to another office building in a half-hour drive would average a data transfer rate of 55.6GB/s which is about a thousand times faster than modern fast internet. 

For rather less important data that can be packed into small containers, an accelerated postal service might be the solution, ranging from hourly Hyperloop trains carrying data banks between cities to courier services that ensure nothing leaves human supervision.

LAPCAT's supersonic jet concept.

Supersonic air travel would become popular again. Hypersonic transportation will be developed, as they would allow data to be shared and synced across continents within hours. Something like Space X's Falcon 9 could be used to take top-level executives or critical engineers across the globe in an hour. 

My morning commute.

Between hypersonic data carriers synchronizing data several times a day and any personnel available anywhere an hour, a physically connected world would not suffer much compared to one reliant on wireless transmission.

Human factors

Having people travel would boost the services industry, meaning that hotels, restaurants and dry cleaning would spring up around any business centre. 

Trained professionals would be needed to handle the protection of data forts. Para-military organizations are well suited to this task, though agents trained to be more discreet would also be useful. 

Relying on human elements to protect data replaces one vulnerability by another. Trying to buy employees' loyalty against their employers is a very expensive task. It is much more effective to 'turn' employees through ideological or psychological attacks, so corporations will need internal control and testing of employee motivation. Psychologists would be in vogue, and psycho-medical research would be funded by paranoid employers.

An honest work environment.

There would also be shift in the value of low wage jobs. Today, low wages are paid to people performing menial, repetitive or simple jobs. Very high wages are paid to specialized engineers that work on advanced computing and robotic work. If the shift from digital to physical security is realized, automation would handle menial tasks that we can afford to fail. Human hands would need to observe, check and protect the flow of data. Their worth has to be proportional to the value of the data, otherwise the least well paid human handlers would not have the incentive to prevent security from being compromised. 

Worldbuilding

How would a physically secure data network affect the world? How would we build a setting out of this premise?

A cyberpunk dystopia can easily be fashioned from this premise. If humans become the central vulnerability for a physically secure system, then managing this risk is the way to reduce or remove this vulnerability. Employee monitoring, invasive collection of biometric data, psychological and psycho-medical regimes... these factors open the door to an oppressed workforce where employers fear their employees and equate cruelty with security. 

Corporate power could expand under the premise of protecting their data. Hiring protection services and buying armored vehicles basically puts military power in private hands. Incidents where this power can be abused are easily engineered. 

Criminals and revolutionaries would bolster the system if they try to take it down. Intercepting data convoys, kidnapping key engineers and penetrating air-gapped networks would make exciting set-pieces for a game, but also strong arguments to reduce the restrictions on corporate power. 

On the other hand, a better society can be built out of this premise too.

Having humans protect data and handle it along all points of its distribution is a great counterpoint to the argument that automation will destroy jobs. Expanding sectors such as transport and other services further employs greater numbers without requiring higher education degrees.

Gated communities are an example of a population that shares locally. 

Localizing and de-centralizing corporations might reverse the trend towards the hegemony multi-nationals have over small governments in developing countries. Having a smaller, better defined customer base might lead towards a greater respect of local cultures and less insensitive advertising campaigns. It might also encourage companies and communities to give back and develop their neighbourhoods in a more social manner, as they do not fear that their money will be taken elsewhere. 

Co-operative or dystopian, a setting with physical security for data is an interesting playground for any author.

Summary

The increasing burden of encryption, or its complete failure through quantum de-coding, coupled with government-imposed scrutiny of the internet and the widespread availability of hacking tools to the public means that the transition to a fully digital economy is riddled with vulnerabilities and openings to attack.

The only sure way to defend data worth millions is to physically separate it from any vectors of attack using air gaps and human surveillance.

Having humans handle data security has many benefits, ranging from protection against automation destroying jobs to a more stable future for developing countries.