Michael Byrne reports:
The expression “fog of war” refers to the dramatic increase in uncertainty—a decrease in situational awareness—encountered by soldiers and commanders in military operations. Where is the enemy? What does it consist of? Where is my own army in relation? This was a very literal limitation prior to aircraft, and, later, satellite surveillance. Intelligence came slow, if at all.
The other side was however much of it you could see firsthand scaled by some best guesses. In this fog, tens of thousands of soldiers could be lost in a single all-but-blind WWI battlefield offensive.
A trio of computer scientists at the US Army Research Laboratory see the fog of war as a useful metaphor for a powerful new form of data security, which they describe in the current issue of Computer as “cyberfog.” They imagine data hacked apart and embedded in a fog network where it’s fragmented into tiny pieces and distributed across not just servers, but end-user devices like the one you’re currently reading this story on. Even if data like this is partially compromised, the information whole would remain opaque to the adversary and remain useful to us.
Read more on Motherboard.