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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.
- Raw signal in memory must bootstrap to status of operating program
- Program must then untangle the inner workings of the host. (Is it possible to now build a diagnosis program to determine the operating set of an unfamiliar computer?)
I'm not a software engineer but... no, wait, I AM a software engineer, so I'm curious, how does this 'virus' execute step 1 [Buffer Overrun & Privilage Escalation] without doing step 2 first [Determine instruction set for system] (Which incidentally requires step one to have been performed first.)As far as I see it, theres as much chance of data in the recieve buffer created by background radiation being a viable 'virus' as there is a deliberate chunk of data will be
This sounds suspiciously like
1) Send malicious code
2)
3) Infect universe (and profit)
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
...completely out of his mind?
;-)
Granted - once we had contact any alien civilisation could also get into a situation where they could potentially send malware to Earth.
But - isn't Seti right now looking at data from stars a good number of lightyears away? How likely is it that aliens on the off chance of infecting a computer would send out virusses and/or worms that would run on current CPUs and chipsets, using security holes that are current NOW? (Remember - if aliens 10 lightyears away would get hold of enough Earth signals to decode Intel assembly language and to understand Windows security holes, even if they could decipher all that overnight and write a terminal computer virus in another hour - it still took them 10 years to receive the signals from us and it would take another 10 years for them to come back). How likely is it that a virus working on 20 year old hard-/software (including OS and everything) would still work on a large portion of critical infrastructure today?
Given that Seti only checks data, but doesn't try to execute it, shields us even further from the whole thing...
Or - is Mr. Carrigan now assuming that there is an imminent threat of an attack by Bin Laden against the Internet - through Seti@home ?
Now that would make even Bush sound perfectly sane...
Because, of course, the aliens use binary Von Neumann machines with register/accumulator architectures, and instruction sets we're familiar with.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
... of someone who's very knowledgeable in one technical field (in this case, particle physics) assuming that this knowledge carries over into another, almost unrelated technical field (in this case, computer science.) I'm sure that Dr. Carrigan is a very, very smart guy, but odds are he uses his computer as a tool without a whole lot more understanding of its inner workings than that possessed by the typical business user.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's pretty sad that they're actually wasting brain cycles thinking about threats like this. No, the risk of infection isn't zero. But it's damn close to zero. It isn't zero if you 'secure' SETI systems, either. It isn't even zero if you dismantle the SETI telescopes.
But money spent on this is money better spent elsewhere, practically no matter where else you spend it. This should have been in the 'It's Funny, Laugh' topic.
(Prediction: this will appear on Schneier's blog by end of day tomorrow)
Has /. become a focal point for all the worlds nut jobs today or something? What with this and the guy asking to move porn onto another port all we need now is one of the monty python crew to do us a silly walk. How do these people get to take control of my pixels?
What's most scary though is that there is a small percentage of people who will believe him. I think those people scare me more now I come to think about it. At least this guy is just trying for his 15 minutes of fame.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
SETI data is pretty much indistinguishable from random numbers. In fact, the extremely rare patterned sequences of data are the holy grail of the pursuit.
.... most likely lots of virus code has already been processed because random noise will eventually produce every virus, just like monkeys and keyboards will produce Shakespeare. One could, I guess, hold the position that by processing random data we are putting ourselves at risk and that rings more true than some civilization producing intentional sequences with malicious intent.
So
And he is after all, one of the most reputable names in the computing field today.
Computer scientists argue that to hack a computer, or write a virus that will infect it, requires a knowledge of how the computer and the software it is running work: a computer on Earth is going to be as alien to the aliens as they would be to us. But Dr Carrigan says there is still a risk.There most certainly is a risk: a risk that someone in the government might actually take a particle physicist's word that aliens are trying to hack the Internet (which, given the speed of light, most enlightened civilizations in the galaxy won't find out about for about 200 years, assuming they are listening in the first place).
On the one hand, I don't know why this is a story. This guy is out of his element, and no one should be taking him too seriously (Independence Day buffs notwithstanding). On the other hand, the chance that people in positions of power with less than two neurons to rub together might take this guy seriously, thereby jeopardizing peaceful scientific research (see Contact) has me just a bit concerned.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
is sending signals out. Although we may think we are saying hello, the receiver may be thinking, "Hmmm, I do need more meat in my diet."
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I suspect that since our species has been blasting out so much noise (radio, TV broadcast, radar) in the past 50 years or so that our presence can hardly be overlooked. That is, if anybody is looking.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Sounds like such bad Sci-Fi that he could become a writer for Threshold.
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I belive he's talking about those pesky abstractions we all use without a thought everyday. Basically, the scenario unfolds in this way: you recieve information from a entity and the ideas contained within said information can be helpful (like Universal Cure) to harmful or disruptive (something along the lines of a memetic virus).
It would be a nasty trick for an alien civilization to give us the most destructive weapon possible without giving us accompaning social skill's as well. Or we could figuratively be on the 'beads' end in some initial contact scenario.
To quote Morris Berman, "An idea is something you have, an ideology is something that has you.". An old alien civilization out there could just be very good at constructing ideologies. I'm not saying now is the time to consider this chance, rather that it should be considered when alien contact occurs.
Shh.
Neal Stephenson is a very good writer of science fiction, but in the case of the metavirus from outer space, the emphasis is on the word "fiction", not the word "science".
What if aliens are listning us and preparing for something big!
Then there's absolutely nothing we can do.
The chances of a nearby extraterrestrial race inventing radio at or near the same time as us are so small that we can discount them entirely for purposes of a thought experiment. They would be thousands or millions of years more advanced - or more primitive. If they're more primitive, we'll probably never know about them. If they're that much more advanced, then they could wipe us out without any significant effort.
Better hope there aren't any Berserkers, Staircase Gods, or Inhibitors out there, eh?
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The author of TFA clearly neither has a clue about SETI, nor about computers.
Malicious signal carrying malicious data? The best SETI can hope to "detect" is a short burst of CW, a narrowband signal. That's like detecting someone talking but not actually hearing any of the talking.
Never minding the whole "aliens hacking our boxen without knowing how they work". I bet this dude takes ``Independence Day'' as a plausible scenario too. What a tool.
It is a highly anthropomorphic point of view that traditional space colonization or info-colonization are the paths that will be taken by advanced civilizations. These are concepts based on the relatively limited perspective of a few thousand years of human civilization and even shorter periods of infotech environments. It seems (to me) much more likely that advanced civilizations will replicate through a process similar to the self-replication process one sees in single cells (e.g. bacteria) and not the infectious parasite process one sees with viruses. The problem is that self-replication of advanced civilizations requires extremely close encounters between the developed resource (presumably a solar system, mega-ship or mega-intelligence like a Matrioshka Brain) with a resource of similar or greater mass & energy capacity. Such a resource should be largely undeveloped (like our solar system but much more likely regions of space where new stars are being created). This allows for self-replication over sub-light-year distances. Given the high energy/mass cost of navigating entire solar systems or mega-ships/intelligences as well as the common trajectories of natural objects in our galaxy such "close encounters" are very infrequent (occuring only over millions to billions of years).
(And for those of you who doubt navigating solar systems is feasible you need to go read related papers by Dyson or Criswell.)
Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois
The notion that a SETI signal needs to be "decontaminated" is plausible only to people who watch too much Independence Day or Star Trek(where the most implausible feature, contrary to popular opinion, is not FTL travel, but the fact that all the computer systems in the galaxy seem to be more or less compatible).
To put it bluntly: there is no way in hell that a SETI signal is going to infect anything.
Even if it did, what would it do? Transfer thousands of dollars to Alpha Centauri? Dial galactic 1-900 numbers? Cause vacation snapshots to be transmitted via Arecibo into space? Cause Windows machines to reboot all over the nation? Kill us all by finally revealing in public Monty Python's killer joke?
What I can't figure out is whether Carrigan is merely incredibly stupid, or whether he knows that his statements are nonsense and is opportunistic. Is he perhaps annoyed at the success of efforts like SETI and wants to create FUD? Is he trying to kill funding for other branches of physics? Or is he trying to get funding for his own pet project? My money is still on "stupid and arrogant", but I'm willing to be convinced of the other possibility.