example of evolution in action, a term first introduced in 1981 by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in their science fiction book Oath of Fealty. It suggests a characteristic of certain situations to anecdotally illustrate the evolutionary process itself.

So, as something of an afterthought, within widespread, heterogeneous computer networks, the consideration of the environment for interactions was ultimately focused on the concept of security. As it is typically used, the word or concept of security is a rather nebulous thing. Too often this ambiguity in meaning is by design rather than through imprecise usage of language. The word is intended to suggest the presence of characteristics that may not, in fact, be provided. We would suggest that a better way to refer to the cumulative set of security characteristics is through the concept of trust, but as we said, we’ll get to that down the road a bit.

So, from this beginning, the discussion in deployment circles tended to focus on security as add-on capability that needed to be somehow attached to the network, rather than a basic physiological requirement. In essence, the trust that should ensue from a high degree of security became a higher level need to be fulfilled somewhere in the protocol stack. So, at this point, we should consider the various characteristics that comprise the amalgam called security.

Within the general field of physics, in the study of interactions among particles, whether it be in the macroscopic world of classical mechanics or in the sub-atomic world of particle physics, dealing with two particles at a time is a more readily solved problem than is the situation when more than two particles are involved. In general, the equations of motion for two-body interactions offer exact solutions whereas three-body or higher groupings allow only for approximate solutions. Consequently, one approach to the classical many-body problem has been, historically, to break the problem down into a multitude of two-body interactions. A very similar situation holds in the interactions among people, which was the first guide to the behavior of computer interactions.

Our model for the interactions among people is to view them as being composed of transactions; specifically, of two party transactions. We suggest that this definition can be further refined to enumerate two very specific characterizations of a transaction. First, a transaction is time limited and second, or perhaps the corollary, a transaction has a well-defined beginning and a well-defined conclusion or outcome. Within the world of computer systems and computer networks, we tend to think in terms of a preferred environment in which we can conduct transactions. Operating within some known security infrastructure, the preferred transaction environment provides some degree of the following characteristics:

These five areas, encompassed as they must be by some means of establishing their respective characteristics, form the metric by which we judge the efficacy of the security of computer systems and computer networks. It is in this playground that personal electronic devices become the big kid players. So, what do these characteristics really mean in the computer world? Well, they mean much the same thing as they do in our everyday world, since these are also characteristics that we must establish to some degree for any type of interaction among people.

Book available at Midori Press (regular)
Book available at Midori Press (signed)
Book available at Amazon (regular)