Cyber threats

As society becomes more and more dependent on the correct and continuous functioning of communications and information infrastructures, it becomes correspondingly more vulnerable to disruptions in the services that they provide. While much of the responsibility for the health of these infrastructures lies in the hands of their operators, both public and private, their ability to protect them ultimately is constrained by the vulnerabilities of the underlying systems. These vulnerabilities are compounded by the interlinkages among individual pieces of infrastructure. The question being posed to the members of this panel is what we, as part of the public, private and academic community focused on fault tolerance, can and should do to design and build systems that are as capable as possible of detecting and thwarting threats. Do our current approaches to designing for fault tolerance lead to good enough outcomes in handling cyber threats, or should we in some way change how we think about fault tolerance? What are our community´s responsibilities in dealing with cyber threats, vs. those of the communities focused directly on security or dependable computing? How should we work with these other communities? We do not expect this panel to yield any definitive answers to these questions. Our goal is to provoke further discussion within our community.