China has developed more secure operating software for its tens of millions of computers and is already installing it on government and military systems, hoping to make Beijing’s networks impenetrable to U.S. military and intelligence agencies.
The secure operating system, known as Kylin, was disclosed to Congress during recent hearings that provided new details on how China’s government is preparing to wage cyberwarfare with the United States.
“We are in the early stages of a cyber arms race and need to respond accordingly,” said Kevin G. Coleman, a private security specialist who advises the government on cybersecurity. He discussed Kylin during a hearing of the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission on April 30.
The deployment of Kylin is significant, Mr. Coleman said, because the system has “hardened” key Chinese servers. U.S. offensive cyberwar capabilities have been focused on getting into Chinese government and military computers outfitted with less secure operating systems like those made by Microsoft Corp.
“This action also made our offensive cybercapabilities ineffective against them, given the cyberweapons were designed to be used against Linux, UNIX and Windows,” he said.
The secure operating system was disclosed as computer hackers in China – some of them sponsored by the communist government and military – are engaged in aggressive attacks against the United States, said officials and experts who disclosed new details of what was described as a growing war in cyberspace.
There has been a dramatic recent shift in sentiment in relation to the most appropriate model for developing software systems. The shift has marked a change from the tradition of preparing a detailed requirements specification as the first phase in the development cycle, to a less rigid adaptive evolutionary approach.
The ongoing goal of software engineering is to ensure that a system meets its primary aims in terms of the quality criteria of functionality, performance, reliability and efficiency. Achieving rigorous standards of reliability and efficiency has never been the major problem for developers; rather it has been the potential for basing the system’s requirements specification on obsolete or inadeqaute premises, which on completion delivers sub-optimal outcomes.
This is similar to the mathematical problem of using excellent deductive logic to draw conclusions from a set of axioms, but reaching a wrong conclusion because the axioms themselves are incorrect or incomplete.
Time and again this Archilles heel of software development emerges- particularly when a project is large, complex and operates within a dynamic environment. Systemic failure is more often the norm and the litany of collapsed projects keeps growing; particularly in the government and multinational business domains of procurement, supply, logistics, human resources, health, education, customer services etc.
I have been trying out Microsoft Robotics Studio ever since version 1.0. Despite the shortcomings of the product (compared to NXT-G), I like what Microsoft is trying to do in the robotics industry – i.e. create one 3-tier interface that is standardised and can be used to work with most of the robot vendors – including iRobot and LEGO MINDSTORMS. [Read more →]
Last Thursday, Microsoft filed patent application 2008/134,132, which describes a method of “Developing Software Components Based on Brain Lateralization.” At first glance, this sounds quite impressive; direct neural programming interfaces, after all, is the stuff science fiction is made of. Closer examination, however, indicates that our dreams of writing C++ code without that pesky keyboard getting in the way remain elusive. Fancy wording or not, Microsoft is essentially attempting to patent something far more basic: the software Quality Assurance (Q&A) process.
