HP CTO: Government and industry should work together on security

What keeps an academic such as the chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard Co. up at night? For one thing, the thought of the government building, in the name of security, its own network infrastructure."I have a recurring nightmare of a federal infrastructure over here, the public infrastructure over there and no trusted connections between them," Richard A. DeMillo said during the Information Processing Interagency Council 2002 conference in Orlando, Fla., earlier today.Far better, DeMillo said, is for industry and government to collaborate on creating out of the Internet what he called an "end-to-end trusted chain" that would use quality-of-service technologies to give user constituencies what they need. For example, the IRS, in handling online tax filings, would need guaranteed delivery notification and authentication. In times of disaster, responding agencies would need priority service similar to what they have now with the switched telephone network."Collaborative investment by government and industry will work out," DeMillo said. "The government should leverage commercial investments."DeMillo said that the administration's cybersecurity chief, Richard Clarke, has had discussions with HP and other Silicon Valley companies on this issue. Clarke has proposed GovNet, a secured, government-only network, as one possible response to terrorism and other threats.