POST The new interstate

Professor Bill Buchanan OBE from the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University is leading expert on cryptography and cyber security (and also an excellent speaker, by the way). I always take what he has to say about things very seriously and I couldn’t agree more with him on his comments about the nature of the infrastructure that we need for the new economy. As Bill says, we built a set of interweb tubes with very little trust built in to them and then we patched them up with what he calls “simple methods” but what I might call string and sealing wax. He says that “our digital future must be towards an infrastructure that properly integrates trust” and goes on to highlight that we already have the tools and techniques needed to do this. We already have private keys and digital signatures and computers and so on. We should have to continue to live with an infrastructure build on fake news, fictional friends and fraudulent transactions.