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Trojan Kill Switches In Military Technology
Nrbelex writes "The New York Times reports in this week's Science section that hardware and software trojan kill switches in military devices are an increasing concern, and may have already been used. 'A 2007 Israeli Air Force attack on a suspected, partly-constructed Syrian nuclear reactor led to speculation about why the Syrian air defense system did not respond to the Israeli aircraft. Accounts of the event initially indicated that sophisticated jamming technology was used to blind the radars. Last December, however, a report in an American technical publication, IEEE Spectrum, cited a European industry source in raising the possibility that the Israelis might have used a built-in kill switch to shut down the radars. Separately, an American semiconductor industry executive said in an interview that he had direct knowledge of the operation and that the technology for disabling the radars was supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.'"
Its a good thing the DoD is taking a stronger, more positive stance towards open source software. I guess the next logical step would be open source hardware.
Didn't Thatcher kill the Argentina's French made missiles during the Falklands war with a remote kill code?
That's what you get for not building the hardware yourself. We on the other hand have been intelligent enough not to outsource our industries to foreign countr... Doh.
(ring)
Hello. Syrian Air Defence.
Hello, Mr. Air Defence. My name is Raji - I mean Bob - from technical support. I have a service request you made on your Acme 2001 Target Tracking Module.
What? We are not having problem with that -
Now, now. I have to clear this ticket, Mr. Air Defence. You wouldn't want me to get into trouble, would you?
Well, no, I guess not.
Ah. Good then. Please reboot your system and we can get started solving your problem.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Dont buy important technology from foreign countries, do it yourself. Especially if you ever under any way, shape or form could cross paths with said foreign country.
I think this should be a really big wakeup call to european countries that relies 100% on american tech, both on hardware and software.
HTTP/1.1 400
Whatever happened to Paris, Helen, and Hector's wife anyway? Did they get away and start a new Trojan empire somewhere else??
You get what you deserve when you outsource...
Seriously, I understand the cost benefits of going with the lowest quote and all but sometimes it's best to keep things "in house" to ensure quality and accountability. And that applies to companies all the way up to governments. In this case, when dealing with national defense, it especially applies to governments...
This will stimulate growth in the weapons industry, and therefore growth in espionage operations, increase the likelyhood of serious diplomatic incidents and therefore War.
That's War with a capital W were the enemy has equipment that is not under your control.
So it's a nice idea, but it only works in the short term - i.e. until you use it. Then the clock ticks to when it's useless.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Seriously, if you are going to wage war, it is a very bad idea to buy non trivial weapons systems from your enemy or his allies. Actually it's a bad idea to buy it from anyone that is not 100% on your side. Best would be to build it yourself.
Those amateur war mongering folks down there. Still don't think that anyone is learning out of it, I mean, where are the chips for NATO equipment come from? Oh yea, who manufactures them cheapest. How does this make sense in the context?
Frakkin' Baltar!
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
Does that mean that the U.S. provided *Syria* with sensitive military hardware (ok.. with built-in kill switches) ?
If they didn't then it's not a kill switch and the U.S. simply provided their Israeli allies with electronic warfare technologies.
It was my understanding that syrian military hardware was russian based anyway..
So I'm not sure I understand the whole thing..
--Ivan
My PC for sure has a kill switch somewhere. Now and then an odd blue screen with a funny message appears on the screen. I wonder who is operating the switch and why...
This the Syrians do have US military hardware, they should demand their money back.
I can't say whether we modified hardware being shipped to overseas contractors at the governments request. I also can't say where that hardware was shipped or where we thought it was going to end up. I also can't say whether we were able to later identify that hardware based on data embedded in its output. I'm sorry, I can't answer your questions; I can neither confirm nor deny your acusations.
I'm not usually a fan of conspiracy theories, but "signals to turn off radar" seems more like a coverup to protect the Mossad agents who really turned off the radar. You can theoretically only use a kill signal like that once, but Mossad agents are much more versatile.
That dude is going to get himself killed by Mossad if he's not careful.
What, did you think the Russians, Germans, Americans, and Chinese are going to risk facing their own stuff?
Morons. Of COURSE there are kill switches in all the things that are sold to the third-worlders. Duh.
That's War with a capital W,
which rhymes with Cue, and that stands for Pool!
So there's a semiconductor executive that is talking about classified information in an interview? His/Her clearance should be revoked, at least temporarily, until an investigation can be performed to determine whether any laws were broken, and how long the executive should serve.
I have a feeling they just didn't shoot due to some command&control screwup and there is no killswitch..
Unit 8200 is responsible for my Windows PC crashing...
In the cold war the united states did this several times to the USSR, one notable example was a gas pipeline explosion caused by a specifically sabotaged piece of software.
Here is an article detailing the event;
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39147917,00.htm
The USSR attempted in several instances to steal or otherwise acquire technology from the united states, and whenever this was detected our counter-intelligence services would provide flawed or otherwise sabotaged technology in place of the actual information sought. This had the desired cascading effect of the USSR unable to trust any technology that may have been introduced from non-USSR sources and was considered an extremely significant part of the eventual collapse of the USSR.
bend like the reed
I understand why the Chinese don't want to use Windows in their defense systems. I am sure there are back doors to encryption, and remote access, and all kinds of sneaky things that the CIA can do to anyone using Microsoft products.
Microsoft can say , no, its fine. Without the source code, how could you trust them?
* Carthago Delenda Est *
IEEE Spectrum properly refers to the attack on the Syrian hardware as a "back door". The New York Times not only failed to use the Hacker's Dictionary, it failed to use the terminology from IEEE Spectrum, which it even hyperlinked to.
Turning off your enemies defenses is one thing, but what about when stuff like this is used to make the enemy seem to be on the offensive?
Oddly, I'm not sure I have a problem with this. It seems obvious that you shouldn't buy military resources from the allies of your enemies. If you can't make bigger friends, don't get in the fight.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
A kill switch needs external communication to be activated which can be quite impossible to implement in many case but radars are basically radio receivers so a specific sequence of radio impulsion at a given frequency could activate the kill switch..
Interesting.
Maybe they confused Jordan with Syria. Syrian military is based on Eastern technology. I don't think that SA-2 and SA-3, SA-8 use US radars.
My understanding is that they took out the NETWORK and COMPUTERS connecting all the weaponry, not the weaponry. So while the guys in the missile batteries were playing cards, or whatever, the search radar was showing cartoons, and nobody ever woke the general up with an attack warning until the bombs dropped. Lieutenants do not shoot missiles unless the general says it is OK.
http://extrados.mforos.com/620462/4505345-israel-unit-8200/
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
In Gerrold's Chtorr series, they used this. A lot of US military tech was in the hands of rebels, and they just deployed a kill switch. But in the book, it was expressed as a last-ditch measure. Once you use it, everyone knows about it, and you lose the advantage. Suddenly all the US allies were very, very concerned, as they began to wonder what US technology wasn't booby trapped.
I'd be really surprised we'd just hand this over to the Israelis if we had it. I'd think we would be saving this for a major military catastrophe for the US--kind of a "oh crap, we are up against the wall and this is our only hope of stopping the enemy." Because you only get to use it once with real effectiveness. Blowing it on a raid by another country (who would have taken them out anyways) seems stupid.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
Perhaps they should run McAfee to prevent this trojan? Then again, perhaps they don't want their defense systems to run slower than a snail that has taken an elephant tranquilizer.
This idea isn't new. "Serious" science fiction since the 1950s has considered the more complex vulnerabilities of more complex systems, specifically including false takeover of control (Colossus and WarGames), malicious Trojan horses (Battlestar), and false triggering of safety/self-destruct signals (Keith Laumer's Bolo stories) (and yes, I know some of those examples aren't the highest quality, but they're well known). The only disappointment in this article is the apparent surprise expressed.
There are secret kill switches without a doubt. In some cases they are very sophisticated, like signal processing checks that look for frequency signatures that act as passkeys to enable backdoor commands. Also, there are specialized modules in commercial products that allow easy tracking of the devices that can be used for missile targeting. Come on, you had to suspect this... It is true and has led to kill/capture of several high value targets.
I've obtained the secret code used to disable the radar systems:
1-6-3-0-9
Veramocor
If I were to have an "electronic intelligence agency" I would call it "Unit 2600".
You know what's absolutely hilarious about this? A kill switch requires a COMMAND to activate. OP probably believes in one world order and a secret cabal of jewish-mason-opus-dei members. 1) Activation requires communication with the kill switch. - A fair portion (missiles spring to mind) of military hardware is shielded from this kind of thing. Can't have a stray emp field junking your hardware in a combat zone can you? 2) Activation requires communication. Stop and think about that. This isn't some craptacular residential cable modem that's connected to the internet 24/7. You're trying to tell me that "they" can magically get line level access to the hardware? - Just like in regular computer security - if "they" have physical access to the machine, you're already screwed. 3) Activation requires communication. Let us suppose that there IS magical over-the-air access possible to some random device. Every single method EVER requires some type of input at the least. Do you really think that NO ONE is going to notice a radio or IR reciever being added to a chip or hardware? 4) Do you really, truly believe that this hardware is preconfigured from the manufacturer for the military? People Telco's (in the us at least) don't even do that! You're trying to tell me that any firm (military or otherwise) is going to tell their manufacturer "Hey, while you're at it, I want you to add this access code algorithm." 5) And finally: Obviously the military/anyone is NEVER going to compare their original designs with what was delivered from manufacturer.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002
From the article;
"In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a new memoir by a Reagan White House official."
All in all, a fascinating article - check it out.
How do Israelis manage to build in kill switches on technology developed in Russia and provided to Syria through Iran? That would involve some deep penetration, which I doubt even the Israelis can do. The Russian did pretty much invent counterespionage, after all.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
James Mowrey?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
This is why I oppose the purchase of the F-16IN by India. It's a capable aircraft from what I understand and fits the MRCA requirements of the IAF, but I really really doubt that after facing its own gear in Gulf War I, the US is going to provide any country with sophisticated arms without a kill switch.
Anyone who thinks that's the lesson, will be back in school later. The real lesson is that you don't ever use anything unaudited, for anything important. And that's not just a military lesson.
The first rule of a successful secret trojan program is:
You do not talk about the secret trojan program.
A good CS major can write an O/S from scratch--it will just either be tiny or it will take him many years. It's a hard project, but that doesn't mean one can't learn a lot given the right foundations.
Now the O/S he comes up with after 10 years won't be as good as the ones now in existence, but it'll still be an O/S.
Chips, devices, components, subassemblies and so forth can all be compromised at any time in the manufacturing life cycle. It doesn't really matter whether some portion of the manufacturing is done domestically or elsewhere. The risk is mostly about people and access to data and the manufacturing process, and people are clearly vulnerable. Furthermore, each stage of the manufacturing process has enough engineering to worry about without having to verify and validate all the previous steps. Sure, major portions of the manufacture of critical military systems is done under heavy security, but not all of it! I submit that although having a completely trusted system is a worthwhile goal, there is a rapidly diminishing return on investment in trying to achieve it. You just won't get 100% trust without some real breakthroughs in how systems are currently built. Therefore you will have vulnerable if not already-compromised systems. I think the important practical question is how to continue to operate effectively without trusted systems, when you know there is a risk your systems will not work, work incorrectly or even work against you. When it starts to do so. That's the challenge.
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
Someone obviously doesn't understand how electronics work :)
In any case, its quite likely that the attack never happened:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_sherwood_080203_doubt_claims_israel_.htm
It was all a cover to probe the radar systems -- which did work and the interceptors arrived on time. Its also likely that Israel used Iraqi air space.
My experience is with very complex and extremely common silicon wireless transceivers, including RF, PHY, MAC, NWK and even applications functions. 6 to 40 mm^2 of extremely dense circuitry (millions to tens of millions of gates). It would be very easy to put into that a block that would be nearly undetectable and that would cause the transceiver to change its behavior when specific sequences are received over the air. In a major metro area, a single broadcast message could shut down tens of thousands of cellphones or wi-fi devices. For weapons that use that part, it could quickly be "Phaser on OVERLOAD!" That having been said, when we do a design and send the design files overseas to third-party fabs in Asia, it is hard for them to be able to modify anything since the finished part will be different than our design file. But, I suppose if you had the money, resources, and desire for total world domination, anything's possible.
I couldn't agree more. Outsourcing work is like taking a job from someone who has something to lose by not doing a job right, and giving it to someone who could give a shit either way as long as they get paid. Bad policy all the way around in my book. Lack of a direct line of accountability, or loyalty counts for a lot when you are talking about potential costs that you cannot foresee.
-Oz
That's all that needs to be said.
Unlike the older systems which just spewed an analogue output to a green CRT, in more modern systems there is lots of software processing the input. It wouldn't be too far of a stretch to imagine that there are inputs which could cause glitches in that software, even if there isn't actually a dedicated killswitch.
And this is a good thing we should have turned our backs on Israel a long time ago. The middle east might have been a better place if this had happened years ago.
That'd be Mowry, you wretched nit.
Being secretive is any person's right - unless said person is working for the government. ONOZ PUBLIC CAMERAS, but at the same time, ONOZ GOVERNMENT HIDING TANK PLANS!!1.
Government is the servant of the people, people aren't servants of the government. People have the right to know what government is doing in their name but governments have no right to know what the people do.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
All that's needed is to say it. Sirian Freedom Party Lives!
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
The best proof of this is that small countries buy military technology from larger countries.
I didn't know Belgium was a large country. Switzerland is also big? As is Israel?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The main problem with the middle east the the lack of nuclear reactors!
o_O
Or most of them, anyhow. Wow, that's clever though. We've been trying to decide the outcome of wars around the world pretty regularly since WWII, this just provides a very efficient means of doing so. It also gives a big disincentive for people buying US weapons on the black market (well, the really bad ones).
Of course there's always the fear of hackers figuring out a way to kill the kill switch, but at least it's one more obstacle. It'd probably be a good idea to ensure none of our craft, etc, have these kill switches though, just the ones we sell. I'm sure we try very very hard to protect the switches, but security systems of all kinds get broken, it's easier to find exploits than it is to create a system that has none whatsoever. If lives (potentially thousands or more) depend on it, why take the chance?
1) Most of the people involved in drug cartels are brainless thugs or stupid patsies. Not the type of people likely to use a high-tech solution to a problem.
Drug cartels don't use high tech tools? I recall people asking who would have a need for a cellphone unless they deal in drugs. And before cellphones it was pagers. "Paging her dealer?" I bet organized crime syndicates, even Mexicans, use computers.
4) The US Air Force. Do you REALLY think that they will allow foreign UAVs to fly for long in US Airspace?
Yeap, they certainly will. The Air Force certainly shot down that Northwest flight to Minneapolis. And that was high altitude. A UAV can fly at low altitudes evading radar long enough to hop over the border. Smugglers even use submarines, which can carry more drugs and other contraband.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I challenge the open source community to come up with a project that can shoot down a drone cruising at 10,000 feet, forget about an F16.
Anyway, TFA was about kill switches in expensive defense systems, not only the kind you get if you're an unfortunate country trying to develop a nuclear program within F16 range of Israel (honorable intent or otherwise), but also in off the shelf hardware the US uses.
Lots of places I know won't contemplate buying Huawei routers for exactly this reason. Much of the Cisco gear on the grey market is counterfeit - same thing. Now that I think of it, the pallet of of Juniper routers I just bought is prominently merked "Made in China". Oh well.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
And this is a good thing we should have turned our backs on Israel a long time ago. The middle east might have been a better place if this had happened years ago.
Yeah, all the Jews would be dead and the Palestinians would still be living in poverty under a corrupt government.
have to prove that there are no kill switches before making plans for killer profits in a gorefest of bombs and electronic warfare.
This dude spoke up this much because he has seen plans to start a few wars here and there, and these wars are going to cost innocent American lives.
This he clearly does not want.
And so he puts his career and life at stake if you think it that way.
This is called courage. At least so it seems from the distance.
Does the Military Indutsrial Complex have a kill-switch?
That is the big one.
Now, if only we could ensure that ALL military hardware had kill switches, and that everybody on the planet knew how to use them.
...in your direction!
Actually, at least for software, there is definitely concern and scrutiny about whether it's made in the US or elsewhere. Or if it's made in the US but by foreign nationals.
On the hardware side, I heard from someone who works in the defense industry that in his organization, ThinkPads are no longer permitted since they became Lenovo.
And no, I'm not saying that it's a perfect system and there's no chance that a bad actor could sneak something in, but it definitely is the case that they are paying attention to where and by whom their stuff is made.
This reminds me of a story I heard about a computer failure that occurred during the Falklands war. This was apparently a bug, and not sabotage...but who knows? According to the story (confession: I've not verified this, but it's such a good story that it just has to be true), the Brits noticed that sometimes their computer-controlled naval antiaircraft guns weren't firing—there were targets—i.e., Argentine planes firing at them, but the guns just froze up. The cause was later determined to be a flaw in the targeting algorithm. The algorithm was supposed to pick the optimal target by weighing criteria such as distance, vector, speed, etc. of the enemy planes. However, there was no code for making a decision if two targets were calculated to have equal priority. The gun just couldn't make up its mind. Sort of a real-life implementation of Buridan's Ass.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
I suspect that a kill switch doesn't necessarily have to be in a critical component of any system. If its in a secondary or tertiary system in a critical path trigging that could disrupt or disable the primary use.
In the IT industry if I want to take down a website why bother with attacking the primary machine if the low level infrastructure is vulnerable; such as chillers, aircon, EPS which often have some sort of control & monitoring I could tap into if I found the right access point.
If anything an attacker could cause a 3 mile island type scenario of disrupting telemetry to force a reaction of the primary system by an operator with an attack upon a low level system.
Sending the right radiation signal to the kill switch of the aircon unit on a radar station in the middle of the Med could naturally overheat the signal processing equipment thereby disabling it.
Now with RF-ID chips possibly disguised into a complex circuit you just can't have to look at the code you have to examine every part and chip die. .mil spooks have already figured out which chips and circuits by their design can be overloaded with targeted radiation to shut them down. Really they are not "designed" kill switches but have found to be weak points in the shielding and are vulnerable to external attack causing the primary system to fail as a side affect.
Not only that I wonder if the
This is Tom Clancy & James Bond stuff.
Would be cooler if Israel sent jets to the edge of the boarder and when Syrian launched they would send Syrian missiles back into Syria by faking out Syria's own guidance and radar then just fly back home untouched -- The press release would read "oops we just got lost and your stuff got blown up by your own guys -- too bad."
"That's the thing with military hardware, once you sell it to somebody, there's very little you can do to keep them from passing it to somebody else. In that context"
OH see they are trying to fix that. You only need to setup an "authentication server" that the software that runs the hardware phones home to every time you boot it up. If you no longer want the party to run the stuff they legally payed for you simply shut down the authentication server. This works especially well when the next version of it comes out and you dont want them useing the old version forever so you can force them to upgrade to the newest version.
We, as people, are a different animal altogether. We do have inherent, natural rights simply by virtue of our existence.
It's not as simple as that. I believe we do have inherent, natural rights, but it can't be by simply existing. Governments do exist. They may be collections of people, but they do exist.
The concept of natural rights stems from one of two principles:
These are not mutually exclusive. Frankly, I think moral reasons work better, but ethical reasons are crucial.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
The problem with weapons of any sort (including back doors) is that they work both ways. We here in America will get burned by the exact same behavior.
Those who think we can trust only Americans to do right forget 1) about little Timmy McVeigh, Oklahoma City bomber and 2) George Washington, our revered first president, was a terrorist and revolutionary first.
a NATO airbase commander in Chief confirmed: pilots not following orders will be switched off from airplane control and flown home by RC ( eject seat disabled )
the UK requested the source code of the joint tactical fighter and threatened not to buy it!
I can imagine ( but no proof ) that the US asks network device producers to include a little Trojan Boot Loader (TBL)!
In a router or a switch this TBL listens to traffic for a initializing command hidden in a packet - most likely coming from a web-search engine.
it can be specifically targeted by its serial number.
So if there is something going on in Tuizerland ;-) get the serial number of their routers and send to the TBL commands to load spyware from packets hidden in unsuspicious answers coming from Google/Yahoo/MSN etc...
If I want to know what company XYZ has in its drawers: what is the serial number of their switches?
The data wanted is added to the search query to one of the Web-services !
recommendation: if you have anything which might be interesting - have your network devices software compiled by yourself or trustworthy AND verifyable sources.
To the military: do your software yourself or your vendor may switch your weapon off! .
Hmm, wasn't there something like this in film, The International (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_%28film%29)
Or at least something along those lines...well, it was a bank, selling what it knew to be useless counter-measures to Istabul, I think (?). Or at least measures which they had counter-counter measures for.
Cheers,
Victor
The Marine dozing off in the corner of the crypto room.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zaruka/2946414133/in/set-72157608078635808/
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
it's if they could use them cheaper than humans. They can't, yet.
Using humans coyotes can smuggle drugs and humans. So they get money from drugs and from those being smuggled. Or their buyers.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Probably true. But it's even EASIER to just build a big bomb in a truck and just drive it up to your target. Very few buildings are hardened against this kind of thing. The point is that it's sort of unlikely for a terrorist to go to the trouble to build a homemade cruise missile (or whatever) when you can make a kamikaze weapon that's more effective and cheaper. This implies (at least to me) that there's still some use in making military grade hardware difficult and expensive to obtain - if building homemade cruise missiles suddenly became cheap and easy, then it would become nearly impossible to defend buildings like US Embassies overseas.
Per the link, Thatcher told Mitterrand that unless he provided "codes to disable the Exocet", she was going to nuke Buenos Aires. Ok, two things 1) does anyone think that Mitterrand's response would have been anything other than "So what?" Threatening to nuke a third party to whom France has no particular connection does not strike me as particularly effective blackmail. Especially considering that it would have made Thatcher look like a mass murderer. Even if she had said this, which I doubt, it would have been an obvious and not very effective bluff. 2) Is there any evidence at all that export versions of Exocet even HAD "kill codes"? I doubt this too. You'd have to send them over the air, you'd have very little time to do it, and if the Argentines so much as ever opened up a missile and examined it, they'd have found a mysterious radio system inside the missile.
I think the linked argument is probably BS.
An Exocet is not a very big missile. If they had hit her, they might have prevented flight operations on Invincible for a while, but I seriously doubt she would have sunk.
If I were to have an "electronic intelligence agency" I would call it "Unit 2600".
I think Blacklisted!411 is better.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
... I tend to agree that it's rather ludicrous for Argentina to be pressing a claim to these islands, when the only inhabitants since the dawn of time have been British. But the story about Thatcher threatening to nuke Buenos Aires is almost certainly bogus. It's a third hand quote that makes almost no sense - she was going to blackmail France by threatening to nuke Argentina? WTF? It would be like trying to blackmail the US by threatening to nuke Malaysia. This whole thing is based on a guy who's trying to profit from his connection with Mitterrand, and needs some sizzle to sell his book. Another hint: if you read about it in Newsmax, better take it with a grain of salt.
This is posted about as often as all those damn xkcd links, and is about as interesting.
How about the allegation that there was a reactor there? In any case signalling to an opponent that you've got trojans in his tools is best postponed as long as possible. It's not something you give away for the benefit a single airraid. the NYTimes story builds speculation on speculation. It's crap.
You should never be Reliant on your enemy's technology.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Ahmadinejad? Is that you?
OTOH, there would be little use for the plans for a multi-million-dollar modern missile to, for example, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, since it would be beyond their manufacturing capabilities (OK, they could probably sell the plans to someone, but we're not talking about that). They manage to accomplish much of their goals (e.g., giving the population the impression that something is being done against Israel, and having a real effect on Israel's civilian population which lives within range) using very primitive rockets.
In addition, it is clear that as time goes on, Hamas only gets better and better at making these rockets.
> until they are wiped out by some of our niftier stuff
This is not always a viable possibility, politically, it seems.
Hey, you, could you please stop broadcasting my door entry code ? Thank you!
We've already got enough unidentified visitors here with this new Diebold supersafe doorlock!
Thank you!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I don't get it.
It the malicious circuity has to be triggered externally and it's unknown when it'll be used, that means that either:
(1) hackers have to get into a network linked to the hardware or
(2) there has to be an external radio signal which can disable the hardware or
(3) The hardware (radar in this case) doesn't validate it's input well enough and is open to buffer overflows/ bad execution based on invalid input.
From what I've read, the Israelis exploited (3) in order to disable the syrians radar systems.
It seems to me that the syrians bought just plain crappy radar systems and then never bothered to test or "fuzz" them.
However, the article seems to be going crazy over (2). However, a simple faraday cage should be good enough to defeat that kind of attack.
It'll create a barrier between the inside of the container and the outside. No EM radiation goes in, no EM radiation goes out.
Any kind of circuity triggered by EM would be defeated. And by definition, any circuity triggered by time is useless because it's impossible to determine when in the future, it'll be required.
And (1) is easily defended against by not connecting your critical defense hardware to any network of any kind. Or by using 3rd party firewalls which have not been made in China/Russia/Iran...
So this is much todo about nothing IMHO.
Even during the Bush administration, the New York Times regularly leaked classified information without consequence. Don't expect infosec to be tighter now!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I remember reading in the late 80's that many US weapon electronics actually had hidden enhanced capabilities and/or features, that in an emergency could be unlocked by some sort of code or special sequence of settings that was kept secret from its normal operators.