If you want to keep modern society in working order, especially during a crisis, you need to maintain a few vital components of its infrastructure. Most of all, water has to flow and communication systems need to stay active. There are, after all, always going to be fires to put out and fire trucks to dispatch.
The trouble, as Emily Frye and Quentin Hodgson point out in a recent report for the MITRE Corp., is that these critical “lifelines” are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack. To solve that looming problem, they suggest that we need to resume support for seemingly obsolete analog systems such as pneumatic pumps and copper wire, if only to ensure that we have fallback options if and when things go bad. Simultaneously, we need to ensure that we’re training workers to understand these predigital systems.
As Frye and Hodgson argue, the problem originates with the migration of infrastructure away from “purely physical or mechanical operations.” While it may be more convenient—possibly even more efficient—to, for example, send emergency communications through other digital channels, doing so exposes them to new risks. The last thing you need in the middle of a sustained cyberattack is to have your emergency communications system go do down too, but that’s exactly what we may be risking. “Each lifeline rides on, and is threaded together by, digital systems,” the researchers observe. “And humans have yet to design a digital system that cannot be compromised.”
This wasn’t always the case. Until relatively recently, the researchers write, “Emergency responders used both copper-wire telephone and land-mobile radio (LMR). To mess with copper wire or LMR, you had to physically access the system.” Such systems may be more difficult to preserve and operate, but that also makes them more difficult to tamper with, and therein lies their strength. Accordingly, Frye and Hodgson write, “Decommissioning copper increases homeland security risk, because failover planning calls simply for relying on another server, router, or data center that is also subject to compromise.”
The point isn’t, of course, that we must revert to these old-fashioned approaches, only that we should try to preserve them where possible. Frye and Hodgson write, “In water, for example, today’s digitally-controlled infrastructure replaced electronically operated pneumatic pumps. Many water systems today still have legacy pneumatics in place (although it is not immediately apparent what condition the equipment is in).” They suggest that we should work both to preserve these seemingly obsolete alternatives—and to disseminate otherwise vanishing knowledge about operating and maintaining them, “at least enough to get us through a real crisis.”
MITRE’s researchers aren’t the first to worry over these issues. As the Security Ledger, which called our attention to Frye and Hodgson’s post, notes, “There is already evidence that the U.S. military is thinking about how to continue operating in the absence of digital technology upon which almost all facets of our society and economy have come to depend.” The Ledger mentions both a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency investigation of “the intersection of the analog and digital domains” and the U.S. Navy’s attempt to train cadets in old-fashioned celestial navigation.
Meanwhile, some in the U.S. Senate have broached similar ideas. The Securing Energy Infrastructure Act, for example, would allocate $11.5 million to analyze and plan against energy sector vulnerabilities. That bill—about which a subcommittee held hearings in March—sounds a little like it’s inspired by paranoia over the supposed threat of electromagnetic pulse attacks. But as a Law360 post notes, “It was inspired in part by a 2015 incident in Ukraine when a cyberattack knocked out power for more than 225,000 people.” Frye and Hodgson likewise to that and other similar attacks in Ukraine, writing, “If it can happen in Ukraine… you, dear reader, can finish this sentence on your own.”
It is, of course, easy to mock calls for a return to antiquated technology. Recall, for example, president Donald Trump’s bizarre demand that the Navy fall back on steam catapults in lieu of newer and more reliable electromagnetic systems. Sometimes, though, analog may well remain an option even if it isn’t the best one. Consider the humble carrier pigeon, which Rex Troumbley wrote in 2013, may still provide a viable workaround for those worried about surveillance and censorship.
In that light, Frye and Hodgson’s proposals seem positively reasonable. Send a signal down the copper wire: It’s time to bring on the pneumatic pumps!
