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The adoption of networked systems and the prevalence of Internet use have created the potential for unauthorized access to critical data. U.S. Defense Department officials believe that uncontrolled Internet connections pose a significant and unacceptable threat to all of their information systems and operations. Ensuring secure transmissions and the authenticity of data while allowing users to connect from remote locations requires high levels of security.

To protect information systems from security breeches, organizations increasingly are embracing a comprehensive strategy that relies on both technology and enforced policies. Meanwhile, the legal system has been hard pressed to keep pace with information system protection issues, leaving many questions unanswered about how far businesses may go to protect their systems.

Uncertainty surrounding a patchwork of commercial information security products hurriedly placed in use on U.S. Defense Department computers and networks is reshaping policy. Successful test and evaluation of these products in specified laboratories will soon become a prerequisite for procurement by military services and defense agencies. As evaluation policy emerges, the National Security Agency (NSA) is embarking separately on a major long-term program to modernize the inventory of high-grade cryptographic devices. The new cryptography will exploit technology to keep pace with modern communications as bandwidth applications change.

Future military cyberspace security may require next-generation network management and intrusion detection systems that combine both short-term sensor information and long-term knowledge databases to provide decision-support systems and cyberspace command and control. Sophisticated computer hardware and software would identify a myriad of objects against a noise-saturated environment. Cyberspace command and control systems would track the objects, calculate the velocity, estimate the projected threats, and furnish other critical decision-support functions.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are developing an architecture to eliminate threats to thin-client computer networks. These networks rely on applications servers to drive desktop workstations. Coupling security elements that will evolve from their work with commercial technology, the scientists hope to create a computing environment that offers increased flexibility and accessibility for network users without compromising security.

Researchers are developing a programming language that enables different computer intrusion detection and response applications to communicate with each other, offering users a more complete defense against cyberattacks. The goal of the common intrusion detection framework is to allow interoperability among the variety of security components that reside on a single network.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories have developed a new encryption device that promises the security and bandwidth accommodation necessary to scramble various types of data at speeds unmatched by many other encryption technologies.

Software designers are applying artificial intelligence principles to new computer security systems. These tools and protocols create the potential for agile software capable of quickly identifying and responding to new threats.

The company that created the secure sockets layer to manage network message transmission security, and today opens the Internet to tens of millions of people around the world, is now collaborating with the U.S. Defense Department to secure cyberspace communications and transactions.

The mechanical principles that protect personal belongings inside a high school locker may hold the key to guarding digital assets. Creators of a miniature combination lock, which consists of six gears that together are the size of a shirt button, believe the device guarantees that systems can be shielded from invasions with a one-in-a-million chance that an intruder can break the code.