My name is Alexander von Gernler, I am vice president of the German Informatics Society
and also head of research at Genua. Genua is a firewall manufacturer and security company.
I am worried about the computing stack that people are using today.
It breaks down to three parts: The secure hardware, the secure software and the secure platforms that people are using,
but none of these three is actually secure.
Once there was a time when you could trust your hardware, when you had the reasonable expectation of security and privacy
by using your hardware; you knew that nothing was manipulated. This is not the case today.
Today we’re facing multiple problems which results in not being able to trust your hardware.
This has in return implications to democracy and society itself,
because when you cannot trust your harware, problems arise like „where do I get my information about political processes?
Do I really want to surf on my computer at home or – if it’s a sensible topic – do I leave this thing unattended?“
Then we’re talking of some kind of chilling effect, that means people refrain from informing themselves.
The same goes for political discussion; if it’s a sensible topic, perhaps
people will no longer discuss things online, because they feel they’re being monitored or insecure.
I think we need to move towards a secure platform, so comprising of hardware, software and the web services that allow people to act with a reasonable expectation of trust.
The reason I consider this hardware and software combination untrustworthy, is
that there are many complex designs and undocumented functions involved,
not necessarily for an evil purpose, but for the sake of helping the administrator,
or helping the manufacturer, as a debug interface or whatever you can imagine,
but all these functions are not available to the user. The user mostly does not know of their existence
and the result is that if you go to some kind of electronic store today and you purchase
some common of-the-shelf notebook, this is not trustworthy. The same is true for web platforms.
Since you’re not paying for them, that means you are the good that is being sold
and most of the time you’re signing end user license agreements which for example
hand over the rights of your communication completely to the owner of the platform
and this also is no good for democracy.