Aneesh Chopra - Its about Cloud and Security

Washington Wire:

President Barack Obama’s pick for the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, got one step closer to getting some keys to his new office Wednesday afternoon, when a Senate panel approved his nomination unanimously Wednesday afternoon.

...Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado asked about the benefits and downsides of “cloud computing” – where data and software is accessed from remote servers – and “what should the Obama Administration do to realize the benefits of ‘cloud computing’?”

“Cloud computing as a number of advantages, including reduced cost, increased storage, higher levels of automation, increased flexibility, and higher levels of employee mobility,” Chopra responded. “The federal government should be exploring greater use of cloud computing where appropriate.”

...Increased use of government geospatial technologies and cybersecurity were on the mind of Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, who asked Chopra how he saw his role “in ensuring that we have an effective, national cybersecurity strategy?”

“If confirmed, I would emphasize a research program on ‘game-changing’ ideas in cybersecurity, to find new ideas that might transform the nation’s information infrastructure to be more secure and simpler to understand and use,” Chopra wrote. “The goal is to make it ‘easy to do the right thing, hard to do the wrong things and easy to recover when the wrong thing happens anyway.’”

Pretty reasonable stuff, especially ‘easy to do the right thing, hard to do the wrong things and easy to recover when the wrong thing happens anyway.’, what I have wanted for eons in application security is nothing more or less than a Try...Catch block that enforces a AAA boundary container on any network program. Is that so much to ask? remember how often CGI/PERL driven sites used to crash? Do you think programmers are that much better now? I think we see much greater scale and fewer crashes because of this one simple safety mechanism (plus memory mgmt).

As far as game changing ideas to "transform the nation’s information infrastructure", I am less sold on this, I think we have limited options for solving problems in the infrastructure, and the real opportunities lie in the infostructure.