Mission Impossible: A Security Reminder

By
Branko Terzic

The newest Mission Impossible film subtitled “The Final Reckoning” was released this week. I went to see it Wednesday night at the Regal Theater in Sherman Oaks CA. with my son Alex. Before the movie started Tom Cruise thanked his colleagues for their efforts and also thanked the audience for choosing the see the movie on the “big screen.”   It was a nice touch.

The promotion describes the film as: “Ethan Hunt and the IMF team race against time to find the Entity, a rogue artificial intelligence that can destroy mankind.”

In keeping with the established franchise, the movie contains plenty of new action scenes, plot twists and a moderate body count, as compared to other recent Hollywood offerings. If you want action, then Tom Cruise, as the hero “Ethan Hunt”, delivers action with what looks like real pain and effort.

Without giving away the plot, I want to focus on the villain in this movie which is a “rogue artificial intelligence” called “the Entity.” There is a detailed explanation about why the “Entity” wants to do this, but I am afraid I missed it.

What I did not miss was the Entity’s ability to breach software installed by the most powerful and technologically advanced civilizations on Earth to protect their fleets of nuclear armed missiles.

Computer security pioneer Eugene Kaspersky, founder of the Russian based Kaspersky software protection systems informed in 2019 that the problem of fighting software breaches with software defense is ongoing.

“The essence of cyberimmunity is to employ a level of protection such that the cost of an attack on a company exceeds the costs of possible damages. Nowadays, no serious cybersecurity expert can give a 100% protection guarantee.”  

However, the fictional artificial intelligence Entity, even if running on a quantum platform, could not breach our missile defense if HardSec was installed. The hardware-based protection systems block breach attempts as hackers, like Entity, could not penetrate a hardwired chip with their software attacks.

Q Net Security Inc.  offers such hardware cybersecurity protection with its Q Box product. Nonetheless, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning is an exciting movie, highly recommended.