Tuesday, April 12, 2011

NSA director Alexander discusses network security for businesses

By Rodney H. Brown

Gen. Keith Alexander is not just a decorated graduate of West Point, or the commander of the Department of Defense’s U.S. Cyber Command, he is also the director of the National Security Agency. Alexander was at the University of Rhode Island Monday, where he was participating in the college’s first Cybersecurity Symposium. The day-long event was in part organized with the encouragement of the offices of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. James Langevin, both of whom participated in the day’s activities as well. Before racing back to a jet to head back to Washington, Gen. Alexander answered a couple of questions for Mass High Tech.

MHT: What technologies should business focus on that would best work with the NSA?

Alexander: I think there are two things that I would put on the table. One is, how would we do identity management, those things that ensure the integrity of the system? So, identity management, non-repudiation of information. The second one is, how do we see what is going on in the networks? The common operational pictures what you can see. How do you see when something bad is happening to the system? Right now, it is all done behind the scenes and there is now easy way to see what is going on.

I think those two areas, you could help us a great deal – not just us, NSA, but the country. These are going to be key to us.

MHT: Are you talking about an easier to use dashboard-like way of seeing network problems, or better ways to see smaller, more granular events?

Alexander: Both. In fact, if you think about it, some of the networks are so complex that you can’t really see everything. So what happens is, you are dependent on the system to tell you what you told it to tell you, but it knows a lot more that it can tell you. So you think about it, it is almost absurd. You know, we built this box and we put all this information in it and we don’t even know what information is in it, and we have to guess what we put in there. You have all this information in the box and we can’t look at it, we can’t sense it. It is in a way ironic. We’ve built this information box that we’ve put information in, but to access it is extremely hard and difficult. How do we turn that around? Because it is information we put in there that we need.