ARTICLE: "Academic Paper in China Sets Off Alarms in U.S.," by John Markoff and David Barboza, New York Times, 20 March 2010
Some classic stuff with an overzealous U.S. security expert in the middle, fostering undue fear.
Larry Wortzel, a China military specialist speaking on the Hill, makes much hay of a Chinese academic report on the vulnerability of the U.S. electric grid to attack. The Chinese academics in question are stunned to learn they are aggressive cyberwarriors:
When reached by telephone, Mr. Wang said he and his professor had indeed published "Cascade-Based Attack Vulnerability on the U.S. Power Grid" in an international journal called Safety Science last spring. But Mr. Wang said he had simply been trying to find ways to enhance the stability of power grids by exploring potential vulnerabilities.
"We usually say 'attack' so you can see what would happen," he said. "My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected." And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang's work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid.
The NYT article then argues that the resulting anger in Congress says more about U.S. fears than Chinese intentions. It also speaks to Wortzel's modus operandi, of course.
The underlying reality:
"Already people are interpreting this as demonstrating some kind of interest that China would have in disrupting the U.S. power grid," said Nart Villeneuve, a researcher with the SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based cybersecurity research and consulting group. "Once you start interpreting every move that a country makes as hostile, it builds paranoia into the system."
Wortzel's defense is gloriously open-ended in its accusation:
In an interview last week about the Wang paper and his testimony, Mr. Wortzel said that the intention of these particular researchers almost did not matter.
"My point is that now that vulnerability is out there all over China for anybody to take advantage of," he said.
My, that certainly is a broad brush.
But serious experts on nets say otherwise:
"Neither the authors of this article, nor any other prior article, has had information on the identity of the power grid components represented as nodes of the network," Reka Albert, a University of Pennsylvania physicist who has conducted similar studies, said in an e-mail interview. "Thus no practical scenarios of an attack on the real power grid can be derived from such work."
The issue of Mr. Wang's paper aside, experts in computer security say there are genuine reasons for American officials to be wary of China, and they generally tend to dismiss disclaimers by China that it has neither the expertise nor the intention to carry out the kind of attacks that bombard American government and computer systems by the thousands every week.
Then Arquilla, who sometimes strikes me as a bit too excited by these prospects, weighs in with an eminently sensible analogy:
The trouble is that it is so easy to mask the true source of a computer network attack that any retaliation is fraught with uncertainty. This is why a war of words, like the high-pitched one going on these past months between the United States and China, holds special peril, said John Arquilla, director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
"What we know from network science is that dense communications across many different links and many different kinds of links can have effects that are highly unpredictable," Mr. Arquilla said. Cyberwarfare is in some ways "analogous to the way people think about biological weapons -- that once you set loose such a weapon it may be very hard to control where it goes," he added.
Wiser words never spoken.
Saturday, April 10, 2010 at 1:06AM 
