The announcement is of course Good News — because once the PCeU is up and running next Spring, it should plug (to the limited extent that £2 million a year can plug) the “level 2″ eCrime gap that I’ve written about before. viz: that SOCA tackles “serious and organised crime” (level 3), your local police force tackles local villains (level 1), but if criminals operate outside their force’s area — and on the Internet this is more likely than not — yet they don’t meet SOCA’s threshold, then who is there to deal with them?

In particular, the PCeU is envisaged to be the unit that deals with the intelligence packages coming from the City of London Fraud Squad’s new online Fraud Reporting website (once intended to launch in November 2008, now scheduled for Summer 2009).

Of course everyone expects the website to generate more reports of eCrime than could ever be dealt with (even with much more money), so the effectiveness of the PCeU in dealing with eCriminality will depend upon their prioritisation criteria, and how carefully they select the cases they tackle.

Nevertheless, although the news this week shows that the Home Office have finally understood the need to fund more ePolicing, I don’t think that they are thinking about the problem in a sufficiently global context.

A little history lesson might be in order to explain why.

Back in 1930’s, Bonnie and Clyde and other US bank robbers were using the new-fangled automobile to flee across state lines — creating jurisdictional problems as a result. The US solution was to make bank robbery (along with auto-theft and other related offences) into federal offences rather keeping them as state-specific infractions. In particular this meant that the FBI could provide federal level policing (tracking down and killing John Dillinger for example).

We have the same jurisdictional issues dealing with cyberspace, with criminals in one country fleecing consumers in another while using systems hosted in a third. The Convention on Cybercrime addresses part of the problem by trying to ensure international consistency where eLaws are specifically needed (which of course is only the case for small parts of eCriminality, fraud is fraud whether eEnabled or not). However, there is limited inter-jurisdictional co-ordination for eCrime investigations — for example Interpol (often incorrectly perceived to be international police force) merely keeps a large database and passes faxes from one place to another.

In practice, most cross-border investigations are done as “joint operations” and the jointness is usually very limited — one force does all the legwork and a liaison officer in the other country deals with local paperwork. There’s usually a quid pro quo element to these joint operations, for budgeting reasons if no other.

What isn’t happening, or at least only in a handful of very specialised areas, is any international co-operation in setting priorities or selecting cases to pursue. Every country is doing its own thing about eCrime, and there’s a widespread impression that any criminal who can operate from “across the state line” is essentially immune from serious investigation.

We identified this problem last year when we (Ross Anderson, Rainer Böhme, Tyler Moore and myself) wrote a report on Security Economics and the Internal Market for ENISA. It’s not an easy one to fix whilst politicians (and populaces) are unwilling to see “foreign” police officers operating in their country, and the establishment of a truly international “cyber police force” seems equally unlikely.

Our policy proposal to tackle the issue harks back to WWII’s SHAEF, which has morphed into similar arrangements within NATO. In essence liaison officers from multiple forces would sit around a single table, working with a central coordinator, to set policy and decide which investigations to pursue. They would then communicate back to their own countries, who have specifically budgeted to provide appropriate assistance. So it’s very like “joint operations”, but the scheme is multi-laterial, and has a true command and control function in the centre — who will quickly learn to shy away from politically sensitive topics and make a real impact on eCriminality.

To summarise then, a welcome to the Home Office for finally finding a small amount of funding for some country-wide ePolicing; but it’s well past time to be working on world-wide initiatives.

Originally, researchers in CEP were not trying to solve a problem of streaming data or streaming events.   Often we read this mischaracterization by folks in the database/streaming domain, as they were focused on the low latency processing of streaming events.   A natural extension of this research has been stream processing software (often called “engines”) that process streaming data with continuous queries, for example market data feeds for algo-trading or best market order execution.  This mischaracterization is partly responsible for why we see many order processing applications in market data stream processing mislabled as “complex event processing” applications.

The genesis of complex event processing was not the stream processing need for “feeds and speed” but the processing capability to solve what can be characterized as the “problem of asymmetric capabilties”.   The term “asymmetric” has been used in the military domain. For example we often hear the term “asymmetric warfare.”  However, in general the concept of “asymmetrical processing capablities” is the true genesis for CEP and related processing concepts and domains.   It is this genesis that distinguishes CEP from EDA, SOA, SOR, and so many other technology oriented concepts.

In order to illustrate what I mean by “asymmetrical processing capablities” we will take the example of the evolution of rocketry.    In the early days, scientists learned how to make rockets, I assume with gunpowder and similar chemical compounds to launch rockets.   Over many years the application of rocketry advanced much faster than the ability to understand the situations created in the sky.    In other words, folks could fill the skies with rockets long before they had the capability to track and identify (or sense and respond to)  the rockets in real time.

Therefore, the concept of “asymmetrical processing capablities” is the situation where there is a capability, such as “launch a rocket, sense-and-respond,” that is asymmetric in nature.    In other words, the capability to detect multiple rocket launches creates an asymmetric situation where it is easy to launch rockets, but hard to detect and defend against those launches.

The same concept can be applied to everyday air travel.   If we could only fly airplanes, but did not have the capability to track the planes, understand situations in airspace, and then respond to changing situations, air travel would be quite difficult.   Lucky for us, the global traveller, there is symmetry in the capabilities to build and fly aircraft and the capabilities to detect, track and follow the evolving situations in the sky.

The genesis of CEP was to solve the problem of asymmetry in cyberspace, or if you prefer, distributed data networks.   The folks who identified, early on,  the problems associated with asymmetry in cyberspace were folks working the the field of network and security management.    This is because there has been, and is currently, a great asymmetry between the capablities to “launch a process or transaction” in cyberspace and the capabilties to detect and track what is going on in the same domain.

In my next post on this topic, we will go into some details of this asymmetry and review the first CEP projects from Stanford University in the context of asymmetric processing capabilities in cyberspace.

The point of all these questions is the same: a backup password. If you forget your password, the secret question can verify your identity so you can choose another password or have the site e-mail your current password to you. It's a great idea from a customer service perspective -- a user is less likely to forget his first pet's name than some random password -- but terrible for security. The answer to the secret question is much easier to guess than a good password, and the information is much more public. (I'll bet the name of my family's first pet is in some database somewhere.) And even worse, everybody seems to use the same series of secret questions.

The result is the normal security protocol (passwords) falls back to a much less secure protocol (secret questions). And the security of the entire system suffers.