Mitsuba Control AI

The Mitsubishi-Sony Network Control System, commonly known as Mitsuba or Mitsuba Control AI, is the chief component of the East Asian Federation's Integrated Defense Network. The Mitsuba Control AI is overseen and operated day-to-day by the Network Defense Command at its central core in the Federation Center. The project was first conceived in 2007, and began operating in April 2010.

History
The Mitsuba system has its roots in two major technological ideas: China's Golden Shield Project and Everett's Limited Artificial Intelligence. The first government issued Request for Proposal was issued in November 2006 at a seminar of network security at the federal level. The initial idea was to secure existing government and military networks from outside influence, without constant human interaction. Developing an autonomous solution to network security would save money in the long term, and be more efficient than human network administrators. An advanced non-selfaware intelligence system was developed over the course of the next two and a half years. It was activated on April 5, 2010.

Composition
The Mitsuba Control System is composed of hundreds of interception stations at international communications cable landing points and the land border with North China. There are four regional hubs, which work in conjunction with the central core to maintain a state of synchronization amongst database resources at each interception station. The central core analyzes all anomalies, and can also scan instances of traffic on demand by NDC engineers.

Purpose
The Mitsuba system is chiefly used to monitor all traffic passing through external internet gateways into the East Asian Federation to disallow malicious and harmful content from entering the Integrated Defense Network, akin to a national firewall, composed of thousands of proxy servers. Data passing through the proxy servers from the outside are first checked against a nationally-synchronized database of known malicious software and a heuristic signature algorithm to detect unknown malware. Results are then transmitted to the central core, and redistributed throughout the network to gateway nodes across the country.

The Control System is also the provider of military and government encryption, for secret and sensitive data, using a AES block cipher variant with a 128-bit block size and 512-bit keys. Like its ability to protect government, military, and civilian systems in the Federation from cyber attack, the system theoretically is capable of engaging in attacks against civilian and government networks internationally, taking advantage of security vulnerabilities or engaging in brute force attacks to gain access to targeted networks or servers. The targets can then be hijacked for a manner of purposes.

Issues
The scanning of all network traffic in and out of the country requires massive amounts of computing power, and can cause traffic to users' computers to be significantly slowed. The Federation's solution for speed issues is to build new segments of telecom networks with capabilities for higher speeds, and to upgrade outdated cables as necessary, which can cost billions of yen.

Citizens are also concerned about privacy issues. Many new homes and businesses are deeply integrated to the Integrated Defense Network, with fire and burglar alarms, and in some cases, security cameras, connected to first responders through it. Some fear that the government can use the Mitsuba system as a stepping stone to Big Brotherism.