The Boeing 737 Max catastrophe, the Russian hacks in the 2016 election and recuring data breaches, even at the NSA, expose serious software flaws in the architecture of Cyberspace. Designed for isolated batch processing in WWII, shared memory led to page-based virtual machines, a privileged central operating system, dictatorial super-users, and the inadequate method of Identity Based Access Control. Unprecedented national consequences emerge from these simplistic binary computers that were never designed to protect data, let alone win a networked global War or support a citizen's cyber-democracy.
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Pre-electronic age computers lack the deep and detailed software mechanics needed to secure the progress and prosperity of citizens in Cyberspace. The Cold War concoction is forever toxic to individuals exposed by the global platform of the 21st Century. Rapid progress is stalled by an outdated architecture that allows expensive but dysfunctional software to require constant patching that adds overheads and new zero-day flaws for malware and hackers to quickly attack. The monolithic modularity cannot scale without losing the hard-won value previously invested. Crime and poor quality forever cripple society on route to a virtualized democracy.
Networked General-Purpose Computers form an unacceptable platform for the Cyber-Revolution. For the same reasons that Napier's Bones never powered the Industrial Revolution. Best practices and blind trust mixed with shoddy software mechanics will never win the War in Cyberspace. To match the success of the Industrial Revolution, power in society must always originate from individual citizens. It cannot be centralized and dictated by a few monopolies. As with the clockwork Slide-Rule, the hands of individual citizens must control the data and the software in Cyberspace.
Only capability-based machine code, sheltered by the symbols and boundaries of object-oriented laws in the Lambda-Calculus, will deliver the monumental success expected by the Cyber-Revolution. The reliable mathematical clockworks demonstrated by the eternal Abacus and the infallible Slide-Rule must be repeated by adoption the Church-Turing Architecture for 21st Century Cyberspace.
Ken Hamer-Hodges is an Independent Consultant in South Florida for secure cloud-based technology and mobile communications. He graduated in the UK, where he developed the first Capability Based Computer (PP-250), becoming a Charted Engineer and a Fellow of the IEE (London). He partnered on a dozen patents developing Object-Oriented Machine Code and Capability-Based Computers. He built top-flight engineering teams in the UK, the USA, Germany, and Belgium and became an invitation speaker at conferences on Operating Systems and Secure Communications.
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