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Stuxnet Was Designed To Subtly Interfere With Uranium Enrichment
ceswiedler writes "Wired is reporting that the Stuxnet worm was apparently designed to subtly interfere with uranium enrichment by periodically speeding or slowing specific frequency converter drives spinning between 807Hz and 1210Hz. The goal was not to cause a major malfunction (which would be quickly noticed), but rather to degrade the quality of the enriched uranium to the point where much of it wouldn't be useful in atomic weapons. Statistics from 2009 show that the number of enriched centrifuges operational in Iran mysteriously declined from about 4,700 to about 3,900 at around the time the worm was spreading in Iran."
..is that you leave one hell of a forensic trail, and so lose the inevitable propaganda war that follows your activities....
Having said that, I still welcome our variable but rapidly spinning overlords...
There are only two nations with the resources, will, and motive to attack Iran's nuclear ambitions in this way: America and Israel.
It figures that hegemony would lead either state to such an antagonistic stance.
While I agree that they are teh most likely candidates, I think Russia and China would be quite capable of doing this too if they turned their mind to it. Probably the UK, France, Gremany and maybe India. All have both nuclear and computer technology
This story made my head spin. Slowly at first, but then faster, than slower again.
Budget cuts in Britain would put a stop to that sort of thing. We can't even get a James Bond film off the ground with American money!
Can't wait for the movie adaptation. I heard they got a book in the works too???
My page.
They're ideologically opposed to enrichment.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
AC motors require these drives to get their speed. 60Hz would be about 1800 or 3600 rpm, depending how its wound. Most industrial drives can be programmed for 400Hz, which will spin the armature quite fast. Enrichment is like spinning glassware on a dentist's drill. Those frequencies at that high of voltage (480 volts typical) has a very high switching rate that requires exotic transistor designs. Given that these controllers aren't very common, say for a juice mixer, they can be tracked and sabotaged by the distributor quite easily.
It's equally likely neither Russia nor China would be very happy to see a nuclear Iran, but not want to be visibly seen discouraging them on the international stage. Stuxnet, lets either of them slow Iran's nuclear program, test a new concept of warfare, and leave the US and Israel holding the bad as "most likely." For them it's a win-win-win. Beyond that, intelligence orgainizations in the West now have a small taste of what someone else can do. It's going to keep the West in knots for a few years, hardening against "the last threat," while they've got the next threat now, and are working on the one beyond that.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I doubt that you would really need that many resources to do something like this.
Aside from the problem that maxwell demon points out with the huge amount of secret internal information required, the attackers also obtained and used several zero-day vulnerabilities and driver signing certificates from two different hardware manufacturers. That's hardly trivial.
I concur,
Also note that whoever wrote the virus had very specific knowledge of the target.
It would only act if more than 33 devices of one of two manufacturers were linked to one controller.
It would act one way if the majority of the devices were from one manufacturer and do something else if there were from the other kind.
I would guess that someone that worked there or someone that supplied parts to the project had a major hand in this.
My guess would be that this is at least to some extent an inside job.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
I would not rule out Russia or China. Both have no interest in a strong Iran but every interest in an Iran that appears strong, since this ties and diverts US and Israeli attention and resources. It also sets a "benchmark" of aggression; as long as esp. China is less of a threat that Iran it can get away with quite a lot, barely noticed. A perceived Iranian nuclear threat can then also serve as justification for building missile defense systems and implementing other military measures that would previously have set off tensions with the Western nuclear powers.
A simple case of cui bono?.
Ugh.. This assumes that
I am just at a loss.. It really is like each response after the next is competing to think of a more convoluted, absurd way that someone you don't suspect could be involved in it.
I fully expect to scroll down and see some justification for why it's internal industrial sabotage of one Siemens subdivision versus another, or Iran launching it against themselves to get international sympathy.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Well thats ok then. as long as its only CONTROLLED by it. Perhaps we should put Windows in avionic packages then, after all, it will only CONTROL the flaps and engines. Would could possibly go wrong?
There's a lot more detail in the symantec virus "dossier". A very interesting and detailed read.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
"It really is like each response after the next is competing to think of a more convoluted, absurd way that someone you don't suspect could be involved in it."
It was Boris in the library with a commodore 64.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
On the other hand the project name was apparently "myrtus", an east-Mediterranean flower, and a hard-coded value for the disable-flag was the date of an atrocity Iranians perpetrated against some Jews (I can't remember the details off-hand, but it's all in Symantec's fascinating report)
It's all totally speculative of course, and probably the least technically interesting thing about this worm is the question of the author. But even besides that the effort and diverse skillsets that must have gone into this thing I feel somehow diminishes the importance of asking "was it country A or B?"
If you think the only question left is was it Yanks or Jews here's a couple that I would raise:
Is there a lesson here about putting too much faith in signed drivers? How about asking what SCADA systems closer to home might be vulnerable? If this thing hadn't been so picky about which controllers it altered what could it have done?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
So, are we talking Stuxnet, or Iocane powder?
Contentment is the greatest wealth
- Sukhavagga Dhammapada
Contentment is the goal behind all goals.
You don't seem to be getting the point dude. i don't care if the things were running Win9X the point is there is supposed to be an AIRGAP which the Iranians didn't bother with. It could have just as easily been an old Linux that hadn't been patched in forever (because the levels of paperwork to approve patches on those kinds of machines I'm sure is immense) or an old System 9 Mac, it don't matter because again it is supposed to be AIRGAPPED.
An airgap means that there is NO net access and ANY device that is supposed to be brought from the unsafe side to the safe side needs to be treated as hostile and go through several levels of screening if allowed at all. Now from what I understand these machines have online activation (dumb) and have default passwords that can NOT be changed (really dumb) and then on top of that the Iranians didn't bother to securely lock down this attack vector nor get rid of even basic weaknesses like USB ports (super dumb) so trying to blame this clusterfuck of errors on ANY OS when the security team wasn't doing their job is just a waste of breath.
Hell you could put an unpatched XP RTM as the controller and not have a SINGLE problem if proper airgap procedures are in place. But saying "If they only used X!" with whatever OS, be it real time or off the shelf, ignores the fact this was a highly targeted attack. If they would have used a RTOS I'm sure there would have been attack code written for it because the Iranians simply weren't following good security practices.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The key here is knowledge. The knowledge to write Stuxnet is extremely hard to get (the holes in operating systems, the ability to jump from Windows to SCADA systems, knowing what speed the uranium was spinning), but this may not be impossible for someone who has a lot of connections, perhaps someone whose family has nuclear process engineers.
There are a lot of people and organizations who don't like either Iran or Israel, and who would happily eat popcorn as both countries went to war with each other. It could be a guy in someone's basement who gets amusement from it the same way someone gets amusement from cracking root and rm-ing / on a university system.