USAF Considers Creation of Military Botnet

sowjetarschbajazzo writes "Air Force Col. Charles W. Williamson III believes that the United States military should maintain its own botnet, both as a deterrent towards those who would attempt to DDoS government networks, and an offensive weapon to be used against the networks of unfriendly nations, criminal groups, or terrorist organizations. "Some people would fear the possibility of botnet attacks on innocent parties. If the botnet is used in a strictly offensive manner, civilian computers may be attacked, but only if the enemy compels us. The U.S. will perform the same target preparation as for traditional targets and respect the law of armed conflict as Defense Department policy requires by analyzing necessity, proportionality and distinction among military, dual-use or civilian targets. But neither the law of armed conflict nor common sense would allow belligerents to hide behind the skirts of its civilians. If the enemy is using civilian computers in his country so as to cause us harm, then we may attack them." What does Slashdot think of this proposal?"

Comments

Re:The path...

[CogDissident]

Read the article. And don't mod people insightful before reading the article yourselves!

It specifically states, in no uncertain terms that they will only use USAF computers for this. And that it will be a way to use retired computers from other sections of the government that would normally be slated for destruction.

He is NOT proposing the use of malware

[The Iso]

The U.S. would not, and need not, infect unwitting computers as zombies. We can build enough power over time from our own resources.

Rob Kaufman, of the Air Force Information Operations Center, suggests mounting botnet code on the Air Force's high-speed intrusion-detection systems. Defensively, that allows a quick response by directly linking our counterattack to the system that detects an incoming attack. The systems also have enough processing speed and communication capacity to handle large amounts of traffic.

Next, in what is truly the most inventive part of this concept, Lt. Chris Tollinger of the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency envisions continually capturing the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find. Even though those computers may no longer be sufficiently powerful to work for our people, individual machines need not be cutting-edge because the network as a whole can create massive power.

Re:I'm Suprised

[hodet]

Isn't the strength of a botnet that it controls systems behind millions of different broadband connections? It's not the number of PC's that matter but being able to use the sum of all bandwidth available behind a gazillion connections. If the military spreads their botnet on 100,000 systems behind 1000 networks then that wouldn't be very effective.

Re:Using bots in S.American countries

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

This has got to be against Geneva Conventions. There is nothing in the Geneva conventions about computers. In fact except for the treatment of prisoners and civilians (and casualties) in war, there isn't anything in any of the conventions.

Did you know that they really don't protect civilians under "contemporary" conditions ? It specifically states that if "the enemy" (anyone whom you're at war with) does not clearly identify itself (which is defined to mean military bases OUTSIDE of population centers and CLEARLY uniformed troops) that civilians, enemy troops AND casualties are fair game ?

As in, if there is a faction using people as human shields, any army fighting them is completely within their rights to shoot all the human shields first. (think about what rights this theoretically gives Israel in fighting Gaza, they go above and beyond what Geneva requires of them, since a genocide in Gaza would be clearly within Israel's rights under the Geneva conventions)

Even in an open war a military is completely within their rights to let a civilian population starve. Everything except direct, unprovoked attacks is not the subject of the Geneva conventions.

The convention also CLEARLY states who gets to judge (obviously without possibility of appeal) whether the provisions of the Geneva conventions allow you to shoot a certain person : the field commander. His decision is final, and he gets to be judge, jury and executioner.

Besides, there isn't a single warring faction in the world today, except the United States (and Israel, Turkey and "maybe" China (insofar you call Tibet a war, besides I doubt you will find China respecting Geneva in Africa)), that even pretend to respect the Geneva conventions. E.g. hezbollah has declared upon multiple occasions that it doesn't, nor does it ever intend to (and then they say something about some prophet not respecting them as justification).

Lots of other warring parties don't respect Geneva : the islamist government of Sudan, Egypt (in it's south), Iran, Pakistan, ...

Never mind civilian computers being fair game. These conventions date from immediately after WWII (not that anyone really thinks Hitler would have respected them if they existed, in fact he would probably have used them to his advantage, but hey, one can hope, right ?)

Also let's not forget, article 29(3) of the Human Rights :

"(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

In other words, anyone attempting to abolish the human rights treaty (one obvious party would be islamists) does not have any human rights.

In practice you will find provisions like that in just about any constitution, in constitutions as varied as both the US constitution and the Iranian one (you know the one that requires the state to execute gays).

Re:I'm Suprised

[mckinnsb]

Actually - they would have to use civilian PC's in some manner , one way or the other, to be effective.

Part of the strength - and 100% of the resilience - of a bot net lies in compromising trusted computers and networks. A bot net built on every army base in the nation would be within the governments military domain space, which would be really only trusted by those within the United States government itself.

Overflowing computers in other countries via DDoS attacks could easily be thwarted by simply blocking incoming packets from those military bases - or all incoming requests from any US domain. If you tried to avoid this block by bouncing these packets somewhere along the way to the attacked computer from the US, then you are involving civilian computers somehow, foreign or US. So you risk bombing either a) US civilian computers , or b) foreign innocent civilian computers, since the military's traffic would have to go through some civilian computer at some point even if it was originally funneled through dark fiber (like Internet 2), and its well within the realm of possibility that the civilian computer would not be able to handle the incoming storm of packets before said storm got to it's intended target, so you would completely miss your objective while simultaneously tanking a potentially friendly system.

You could build it without using a civilian computer, but you couldn't use it without effecting a civilian computer, and the odds of hitting an innocent would be huge. It sounds like they are considering "Counter DDoSing" people that attempt too "DDoS", which personally sounds like a really, really dumb idea. It could potentially cause a lot of collateral damage. Conventional military thinking does not apply analogously to the internet; you can return fire in real life, but returning fire on the internet isn't always a smart decision.