rapid development of software without standards of correctness has opened up many

rapid development of software without standards of correctness has opened up many routes to exploit von Neumann architecture’s storage of data and instructions in the same memory. One of the most common routes, known as “buffer overrun,” involves an input number (or long string of characters) that is bigger than the programmer expected and overflows into where the instructions are stored. By carefully designing an input number that is too big by far, someone using a piece of software can infect it with instructions not intended by the programmer, and thus change what it does. This is the basis for creating a computer virus—so named for its similarity to a biological virus. The latter injects extra DNA into a cell, and that cell’s transcription and translation mechanism blindly interprets it, making proteins that may be harmful to the host cell. Furthermore, the replication mechanism for the cell takes care of multiplying the virus. Thus, a small foreign entity can take control of a much bigger entity and bend its behavior in unexpected ways. These and other forms of digital attacks have taken the security of our everyday lives from us. We rely on computers for almost everything now. We rely on computers for our infrastructure of electricity, gas, roads, cars, trains, and airplanes; these are all vulnerable. We rely on computers for our banking, our payment of bills, our retirement accounts, our mortgages, our purchasing of goods and services—these, too, are all vulnerable. We rely on computers for our entertainment, our communications both business and personal, our physical security at home, our information about the world, and our voting systems—all vulnerable. None of this will get fixed anytime soon. In the meantime, many aspects of our society are open to vicious attacks, whether by freelancing criminals or nation-state adversaries. The second development is that computation has gone beyond simply computing functions. Instead, programs remain online continuously, and so they can gather data about a sequence of queries. Under the Wiener/Turing/von Neumann scheme, we might think of the communication pattern for a Web browser to be: User: Give me Web page A. Browser: Here is Web page A. User: Give me Web page B. Browser: Here is Web page B. Now instead it can look like this: User: Give me Web page A. Browser: Here is Web page A. [And I will secretly remember that you asked for Web page A.] User: Give me Web page B. Browser: Here is Web page B. [I see a correlation between its contents and that of the earlier requested Web page A, so Iwill update my model of you, the user, and transmit it to the company that produced me. ] 53 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016273