Improving Resilience in Cybersecurity and Spectrum

Society increasingly depends on computer networks and wireless systems. Yet, outages and adverse incidents are regular occurrences.  It has become essential for this technology to maintain an acceptable level of service—in other words, to be resilient.

Different fields have different approaches to becoming resilient. For example, medicine and electric grid management learn from many decades of practice and mistakes to improve the safety and robustness of service delivery.  Their overarching goal is to drive greater awareness and learn from experience, not to cast blame or scapegoat individuals for mistakes.  In the fields of cybersecurity and spectrum, by contrast, there are no institutional strategies for capturing information around outages, attacks, and interference, which in turn would enable learning around why such harms arise and drive better practices to avoid them in the future.

This conference will explore institutional strategies in health care and electricity to improve the resilience of computing and radio systems.  We will bring together a range of professionals, academics, and policymakers to consider how such institutional strategies could be developed and implemented in areas of cybersecurity and spectrum.