Benzinga - Tracing the evolution of cyber warfare reveals a transition from abstract notions to concrete challenges, reshaping the intersection of global security and technological advancements.
The Rand Corporation published an early report on cyber warfare in 1993, defining it as “knowledge-related conflict at the military level.”
Before the February 2022 invasion, Russia used cyberattacks to target critical energy infrastructure in Ukraine. In the past 50 years, cyber warfare has gone from the stuff of science fiction to a fact of life, with risks more or less evident to the average citizen.
The acceleration of available technology, including the November 2022 launch of Open AI’s ChatGPT and the mainstreaming of AI, has raised more questions – and anxieties – than it has answered. We have yet to find an encryption standard that is impervious to attack.
Maj. Jason Lowery, U.S. Space Force engineer, and MIT fellow, recently posted an open letter to the Department of Innovation of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) proposing a different kind of protection from cyberattacks – instead of going smaller and more efficient, what about macrochip computing?
To put the hypothetical differently – if hacking the DoD costs $5,000 per keystroke, who would have the resources to try?
POW Networks As A Military Offset
Lowery considers Proof-of-Work (POW) networks like Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) an “offset,” which the military defines as using leading-edge technology to counterbalance potentially superior numbers by an enemy. In this case, Lowery recommended using a POW network as an “offset strategy for the 21st century” – one that has been under-appreciated by the defense department because of its close association with cryptocurrency.
“Although commonly associated with cryptocurrency, the Bitcoin protocol could alternately be described as the most operationally successful use of what early engineers called a reusable proof of work… cybersecurity protocol (for) securing financial information from systematic exploitation and abuse.”
Lowery wrote that for over 80 years, software engineers have sought to protect data with increasingly sophisticated encoded logic. However, no level of encryption makes a cybersecurity system immune to systematic exploitation. He proposes using a POW system can make it “too costly to execute physically.”
While the general trajectory of computing has been to make computers smaller and more sophisticated, a “macrochip” approach is uncharted territory, and Lowery proposes that the DoD could use the global power grid to design an extensive, intentionally resource-intensive system that would require a significant amount of energy and resources to exploit.
He pointed out that when viewed from space, the global power grid looks a bit like a microchip writ large across the planet Earth.
Lowery proposed that the Bitcoin network has already effectively scaled a resource-intensive global network using the power grid – effectively making a target that is too vast and expensive to hack. This approach mirrors deterrence strategies used in land, sea, air, and space defense, where imposing steep physical costs on enemies is the primary means of protection.
So, the idea is to bring physical restrictions, with energy-intensive computing on a POW system, into the cyber realm and create an intentionally expensive and demanding method of computing that is simply out of reach for most smaller parties and even for state-funded hackers.
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Would It Work?
Benzinga spoke with Christopher Alexander, a former information operations planner who worked with the U.S. Army and SOCOM and led projects for the U.S. Government to develop public overt and covert influence campaigns. Alexander is currently the CMO of Pioneer Development Group, creators of Liberty Blockchain.
Alexander responded that the idea is feasible and has some precedent if you consider the effort required to hack a blockchain network.
“I think it may be viable. It is crucial to understand that the author is talking about Proof of Work, not necessarily BTC. The encryption power of blockchain is a serious headache for even the NSA to crack, which speaks to its efficacy.”
Because Lowery’s proposed macrochip POW network would be private, it wouldn’t be subject to 51% attacks and other common ways to subvert public blockchain networks.
So, although the idea is unproven in practice – outside of Bitcoin – going with a bigger, resource-intensive solution has merit as an idea that hasn't been tried before.
“I think this is both a deterrent for security purposes and an infrastructure advantage. The federal government has over 12,000 data centers, and much of this technology is becoming outdated. Distributed computing is entirely viable for the federal government,” Alexander said.
Lowery’s concept has the potential to change the paradigm of data security, enabling the Department of Defense (DoD) to apply its most effective strategy for achieving dominance on the battlefield, which involves leveraging larger scale, enhanced resources, and advanced technology.
Force multipliers such as heavy armor and battleships convey a strong signal to adversary military forces, highlighting the significant barriers to entry and the substantial resources required to contend on the battlefield with these specialized and exorbitantly costly weapons.
Using a global, private POW network would allow the DoD to create a similar situation on a virtual battlefield by using a means of computing that is too expensive for many groups of bad actors to compete with, including terrorist organizations but also many state-run programs.
However, the considerable energy demands of Proof of Work (PoW) networks have long been a subject of debate among U.S. politicians, who have frequently used this issue to criticize the blockchain industry. This makes the emergence of this innovative solution somewhat ironic for those within the blockchain sector.
Will the DoD explore using a POW network for national data security? Although its practical implementation remains uncertain, this consideration marks a progressive moment for blockchain technology, as it gains recognition and understanding among decision-makers outside the blockchain community.
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