Network Design Lessons from a cyberpunk future

As a solo/small-team Sysadmin I’m starting to feel overwhelmed by the amount of zero days, remediations, critical patches etc. that our industry is wrestling with. Anyone who is even remotely involved in cybersecurity, specifically the remediation and vulnerability management side, is feeling the burn.

It has me thinking about Cyberpunk.

In the lore of the universe, in June 2022 (so our own timeline is doing better than this universe so far!) a hacktivist named Rache Bartmoss unleashed a virus that was designed to target corporate networks and leak all their data publicly. The virus was virtually unstoppable, infected 78% of the internet within months, and caused untold billions in damage to both corporations and people alike.

There was also an unintended side effect. Publicly releasing an entire network worth of data unfortunately also meant unleashing these corporation’s private AI systems out into the wild, exposing them to other hackers, unfiltered training data, etc. These unleashed AIs basically went rogue and turned the remainder of the internet into something actively dangerous to traverse or use.

The end result of all this by the year 2077 is that the public internet still “exists” but almost purely for AI, and the rest of humanity has their own little LANs hidden behind a gigantic, centralised firewall called the Blackwall, keeping any AI away from these networks. The WAN is effectively extinct, and data transfers between different cities’ networks default back to good old sneakernet.

Anyone working in cybersecurity at the moment probably thinks this sounds like a dream: No internet exposure? No supply chain compromise because everything is local? Sign me up!

Recently it feels like we’re heading towards a version of this at rapid pace.

Wake up Samurai

The topic of AI being dangerous, accelerating, creating developer burnout and killing the internet has been done to death, I’m not going to rehash it because i’m simply not as smart as the people who’ve already talked about it.

What I AM going to do is praise Mike Pondsmith, creator of the Cyberpunk universe, for being some kind of techno-prophet. If the articles linked above add up, they become an (admittedly boring) version of the internet as it exists in the Cyberpunk universe - A place for AIs, not a place for human beings.

This is starting to feel a little eerie. The internet is beginning to feel made for machines, a place where hosting something yourself is nearly impossible due to powerful cybersecurity models scanning and generating attack chains faster than any defender could possibly think.

To someone like me, who has to operate some internet facing services, it can be extremely stressful to know we’re exposed constantly. Every vulnerability advisory is met with a flinch, and that nagging question of “are we running this?”

Do I want the internet to be disconnected? Do I truly want computer-to-computer communication limited to within a city at the furthest? Ask me again in 10 years.

What I think we can take away from the cyberpunk universe is things like layered network security by design. Those internet-facing resources? Leave them on their own network, completely cordoned off from anything else. Treat them as a cyber-biohazard, quarantined and accessed only via a DMZ or jumpbox. It’s the same thing that’s been said for the last 20 years but this time it’s coming from a video game so people like me will listen.

If you absolutely must have something on the internet (for advertising purposes, or like me your own self-interest), consider something that’s considered a bit safer and has nothing to “break” behind it, like static site generators (Hugo #1!)

Or maybe people like me will get tired and just move to Gopher or Gemini (Not Google’s Gemini - The REAL Gemini) before they too are swallowed by the machines.