How QWERX Enables Self-Aware Networks
John Archibald Wheeler was one of the great minds and physicists of the 20th Century, and an outstanding teacher. He may be best known for the concept that the universe is not made up of energy and matter, but of information. Wheeler’s personal license plate was ITS BITS. One of Wheeler’s more famous students was Richard Feynman and I claim to be a student of Feynman’s – once removed. I make this claim, because a college roommate of mine was actually a physics student at Cal Tech in Feynman’s class when he delivered the lectures that later became the famous Feynman lectures on physics. If you have never heard them, I highly recommend that everyone with even a high school level of science education listen to the first six lectures.
This trip down memory lane was recently spurred by discussions about the advent of AI and the question of whether information can be “aware.” Or more specifically, is digital information aware? Under Wheeler’s concept of the universe being made of information, all those bits went rattling around in space (I’ll leave the discussion of what space is to others), until here on earth some of it organized into life about a billion or so years ago. As interesting as that is, not much happened with life for quite a while after that. But we do know that information that is organized as life has the quality of being aware.
What does it mean for information to be aware?
Plants are aware and if we study them, we can observe this to be true. Plants are aware of gravity; they always grow right side up. That property is called geotropism. Plants are also aware of light. That is a good thing, because otherwise all that chlorophyll would be wasted. Some plants, including sunflowers, are aware of Coriolis forces, or the rotation of the earth. These plans use a capability called phototropism to re-orient their growth towards the direction of the sun, continually adjusting to the fact that the earth rotates and because of that the sun traces a path across the sky.
In the mid-20th Century, a new form of information emerged: digital information. It may have taken life hundreds of millions of years to become aware, but it is only decades since the emergence of digital information.
Digital Information Awareness
QWERX has developed a cybersecurity approach that makes the network it is deployed on autonomously self-aware. There is no central nervous system, algorithms or driver other than a QWERX-enabled network. It reacts to a stimulus, and responds in a way that it never has before with information that did not exist before the stimulus and won’t ever exist again.
This awareness enables the protected network to act autonomously in a fashion that an adversary cannot predict, cannot prepare for, and cannot leverage to use for its next attack. A QWERX-protected network's defense is able to be faster than the attacker’s offense. There is no algorithm for the attacker to use to predict what the defense will do next with sufficient precision to ever supersede this protection.
Contact us if you'd like to learn more about how QWERX delivers digital self-awareness to the cybersecurity universe.
