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Is SETI a Security Risk?
Dotnaught writes "Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, fears the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) may be putting the earth at risk. As reported in the Guardian, Carrigan frets that alien radio signals could pose a security risk. The report cites a 2003 paper entitled "Do potential Seti signals need to be decontaminated?" but Carrigan's website has more details. Basically, he's calling for isolation of SETI computers and additional security measures. He writes, "To paraphrase Cocconi and Morrison for the possibility of a malevolent SETI signal ...the probability of a contaminated SETI signal is difficult to estimate; but if we never consider it the chance of infection is not zero."" Frankly, I'm more worried about some phishing malcontent then I am about the Grays, but maybe that's just me.
The "malicious signal" may be of earth origin, just send it to the antennas on the right frequency and make it similar enough in shape to the space noise and it will get processed just the same. Or hijack a DNS and post new "work units" with malicious content acting as SETI.
Thing is you don't need to separate the data, you just need to make the processing software secure, in such a way that data is analysed and never executed, there's no chance of buffer overflow or other potential risks coming from the data. Simple as that.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The possibility that extraterrestrials will take over SETI is pretty remote, but SETI is still a security risk. In decreasing level of probability, I'd say the risks are:
- someone could hack the server and send out malicious code with the next software update
- someone could hack the data stream and inject malicious data into it (assuming there really is such a thing as malicious data, which I find hard to believe).
- someone terrestrial could broadcast malicious data in such a way that the SETI telescopes pick it up and think that it's ET in origin.
- an ET could broadcast malicious data, after having picked up a copy of the SETI software and analyzing it.
- an ET could broadcast malicious data without knowing what the receiver is like (the worry describe in TFA).
A nice story about this, the false authority syndrome: http://www.vmyths.com/fas/fas1.cfm
"The technology of the signal", eh? Look, a signal is a signal. A radio wave is a radio wave--it is not also magically a sandwich. If we receive something, whatever it does will be done through our technology. If these ETs have something that allows them to view us instantaneously and manipulate matter over here, they won't be worrying about radio signals, and we'll have bigger problems anyway.
It's okay to think outside the box, just don't think outside of the laws of physics.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.