A Rubicon.pdf

Cybersecurity and humanity's future are now conjoined, making a full analysis too broad and subtle. Time is irreversible, and security mechanisms aim to achieve irreversibility and timelessness. The quality of these mechanisms is calibrated by the time it takes to reverse them. Interdependence within society, centered on the Internet, contributes to correlated risk and unacknowledged correlations, leading to heavy tails in probability distributions. Complexity hides interdependence, making it the enemy of security. Two cyber risks rise to the level of national security: critical services with single points of failure and cascade failure, which intersects with complexity and interdependence. Mitigation is context-dependent, and redundancy may not be effective against sentient opponents. The rapid rate of change and innovation can exacerbate cyber risks, and addressing these risks may require pausing progress, driving the mean time between failures to infinity, or driving the mean time to repair failures to zero.