US Nuclear Missile Silos Use Safe, Secure 8" Floppy Disks

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Sean Gallagher writes that the government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s and although the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven't changed much and there isn't a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein told Leslie Stahl from "60 Minutes" that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they're not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software. "A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network," says Weinstein. "Cyber engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely secure in the way it's developed." While on the base, missileers showed Stahl the 8-inch floppy disks, marked "Top Secret," which is used with the computer that handles what was once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), a communication system that delivers launch commands to US missile forces. Later, in an interview with Weinstein, Stahl described the disk she was shown as "gigantic," and said she had never seen one that big. Weinstein explained, "Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world.""

Comments

That big?

[jonnythan]

"I've never seen a floppy that big!"

"Wait til you see it spinning."

Re:That big?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've never seen a floppy that big!"

Just wait until she sees the 14" hard disks.

Re:That big?

[mi]

Just wait until she sees the 14" hard disks.

And the perforated tape — don't forget the gorgeous sexy nothings, that can be mode from that...

Re:That big?

[Peter Simpson]

According to Wikipedia, Leslie Stahl was born in 1941, joined CBS news in 1972 and became a correspondent in 1974. So, she started working for a major news organization right about the time the 8-inch floppy hit its peak. Hard to believe she didn't see one somewhere. Maybe she just forgot, but the PDP-11 and the RX01/02 would have been ubiquitous in a news organization, one would think.

Re:That big?

[Kazoo the Clown]

Don't forget to show her the Mona Lisa printed out on the line printer...

Re:That big?

[Chewbacon]

Phrasing, dammit!

Re:That big?

[hey!]

Sure, an RK07 disc pack would be even *more* secure, for *both* sides. Those things used to crasah if you looked sideways at them.

Re:That big?

[NicBenjamin]

She may actually have used a terminal for data entry, or research in the 70s; but she wouldn't have been saving to her personal floppy disk. She'd have been saving to a file in her space (highly unlikely), printing out hard copy (more likely), or hitting some "file" button to send it to her editor (most likely).

But she'd have no more clue which disks they used then a subsistence farmer from Mozambique. Her first exposure to disks would probably be reporting on the Apple II, which used Woz's famous new disk-drive-control circuits and 5 1/2" disks.

Re:That big?

[HornWumpus]

ubiquitous?

It's hard to remember just how niche computers where back then.

She, no doubt, submitted her stories to her editor on paper. Who marked it up, had it retyped and sent down to typesetting.

Re:That big?

[Belial6]

Are we still doing phrasing?

Re:That big?

[geekoid]

Or maybe she was just never involved with computers? It's not like they were on her desk.

Re:That big?

[CmdrTamale]

and 5 1/2" disks

5.25 inch, please
--
If its worth doing - its worth having a beer when you've finished. Please email beer, fax broken.

Re: That big?

[evan_arrrr!]

Universities and colleges were also the earliest adopters of new technology, especially computer technology, especially during the '70s. I wouldn't be surprised at all if your college had this stuff before any major news organization did.

They say 8"

[Anonymous Coward]

They say 8", but their wives privately shared that they were only 6" on a good day.

Re:They say 8"

[ColdWetDog]

They say 8", but their wives privately shared that they were only 6" on a good day.

5 1/4.

Or, for some unfortunates, 3.5

Re:They say 8"

[NapalmV]

Or, for some unfortunates, 3.5

Ah, the Sony ones... going as low as 2" (Mavipack).

Re:They say 8"

[Zynder]

You have huuuge American floppy. Our floppy is a so small....

Re:They say 8"

[cusco]

Wang word processors had 2 1/2" floppies, IIRC. A co-irker was complaining that he had to find some special equipment to "examine a 2 1/2 inch Wang".

"...and said she had never seen one that big"

[QilessQi]

"Uh... phrasing."

Re:"...and said she had never seen one that big"

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop molesting pre teens.

Security through Antiquity?

[jlegelis]

Brilliant strategy...

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[the magic word]

That's why I always surf on my C64. If floppies are safe, I must be invunerable with my tapes.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[B33rNinj4]

All jokes aside, it actually is fairly secure against some types of intrusions. The real issue is maintaining antiquated technology, and making sure new users are trained on it.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so much. This is actually more along the lines of "If it aint broken, don't fix it".

Some systems are so deeply entrenched that replacing them often becomes a nightmare and you are not necessarily gauranteed with a more stable, robust replacement system.

Even though some of these systems are old, they are often very very stable.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[The123king]

Loving the sarcasm, but seriously, these antiquated systems are probably a lot more secure than many modern systems. After all, it's next-to-impossible to hack one of these missile control systems if they're not connected to the internet and code must be loaded on 70's era floppy disks (which are next-to-impossible for Joe Bloggs to get hold of)

Sure, it's terrible energy-inefficient, and the support costs must be through the roof, but i'm more comfortable knowing that the missile control systems are running on pre-internet (and even ARPANET?) systems. It means the many enemies of the US cannot just hack into the missile control systems and start armageddon. No internet, no hacking, no problem.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[MightyMartian]

Indeed. How long has it been since anyone manufactured 8" disks? Twenty years at least, I'd say. I inherited an old Tandy 6000 computer running Xenix which had an 8" drive back in the early 1990s, and I remember even then they were special order items. At that point high density 5.25" inch and 3.5" drives were coming into their own.

Not only are the floppies old, but the drives are old, and keeping old floppy drives going can be a pain.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Not so much. This is actually more along the lines of "If it aint broken, don't fix it"

I think you've just broached the interesting problem of fixes, spare parts, and replacements.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[rjune]

I have a set of 8" Floppy drives that I can't give away! (DS-DD drives with a 1.2 MB capacity!) Post a reply if you want them (SE Wisconsin area)

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[FatLittleMonkey]

(which are next-to-impossible for Joe Bloggs to get hold of)

I don't think Joe Bloggs is the one trying to breach a US nuclear silo.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[jythie]

Actually it is a pretty good one. Older equipment has been vetted for a good long time, and is generally simpler so there are fewer points where new vulnerabilities might exist. One of the reasons we have had so many security problems is the constant flow of new features being tacked on at every level combined with people wanting the technology to do so much more.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[jythie]

With tech from that erra, it is a lot easier to fabricate replacements from scratch then today. For that matter, more of it can be fixed as opposed to being integrated in such a way that your only option is to trash and replace.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[IQzeroIThero]

No Skynet to launch Nuclear Missiles and start a machine vs human war :D

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Albanach]

After all, it's next-to-impossible to hack one of these missile control systems if they're not connected to the internet and code must be loaded on 70's era floppy disks (which are next-to-impossible for Joe Bloggs to get hold of)

This sounds a whole lot like security through obscurity. Not that obscurity isn't good if it makes things harder, but it would be a mistake to rely upon it in any way.

Given the agents you are trying to secure against - i.e. foreign governments - the resources to acquire and develop for 70s and 80s era equipment are easily obtainable.

If the technology being old leads to a lack of developers familiar with the equipment and software, it could quickly become a significant hindrance to good security.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[mr_mischief]

I would pay for shipping to Texas, or I'll be in the Chicago area in July. Heck. I'll be there this weekend but my schedule is tight.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[LifesABeach]

Just let the Whale Saving Islamic Rainbow Commies for Jesus try and put a virus in my punch card deck!

Security through Obscurity, if it works for m$ IE, it'll work for one of the largest nuclear stock piles.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[camperdave]

I have a set of 8" Floppy drives that I can't give away! (DS-DD drives with a 1.2 MB capacity!) Post a reply if you want them (SE Wisconsin area)

USB or SATA hookup?

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[jmyers]

I had customers with 8" floppy drives up until '95 or so. Mostly Persci dual 8" drives, I would shutter any time I got a call from one of them. I did many cat eye alignments. I was glad to see the last of those go off contract along with the 17" CDC hard disk drives. Nothing like the smell of a head crash on one of those.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[badboy_tw2002]

Its not security via obscurity because the real security doesn't rely on the lack of 8" floppies. The real protection is a) not being hooked up to the internet, b) lots of doors & guys with weapons standing between you and the control station. But I guess if some airforce commander throws a few bones to a dumb journalist and has a laugh about it back at the club with the boys, is that obscuring the real security?

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[I'm New Around Here]

Oh sure, you think we're that easy to fool? Trying to get us to use your 8" disks with hidden backdoors encoded in them? No thank you. We get all of our supplies from official channels, which source from the IBM division called Lenovo.

Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein
Commander, U.S. Strategic Command

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[SuricouRaven]

Where the bugs in the code are silverfish.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[bws111]

No, it is not anything like security through obscurity. It is more like security through the-only-way-you're-getting-near-the-thing-is-by-getting-past-heavily-armed-military-personnel.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Fighting with the old drives probably isn't a pleasant business; but I wonder how difficult DIY-ing really antique floppy disks would be?

We still manufacturer magnetic thin films on flexible media, for the last few 3.5 inch floppies and other purposes, and I'd imagine that you could get away with putting a very low resolution magnetic pattern on film capable of a much finer one (though not the reverse), so if you could convince a maker of magnetic medium for floppy or tape storage to sell you some film in whatever larger size the finished product is cut down from, you might need little more than the ability to cut in a neat circle and then fold together the outer case.

I wouldn't depend on it for archival purposes; but it wouldn't surprise me if it would work.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[FatLittleMonkey]

It's secure against a Stuxnet style sabotage attack, and secure against a remote hack. But hijacking a nuclear missile silo is a different type of mission.

You could likely simulate the entire system on a damn Arduino. On site, just open a panel, swap out a cable, bypass the whole control system.

Even if the floppies themselves contained some data or codes necessary to access/program the missiles (for example), given the low data densities, by modern standards the magnetic domains are the size of cows. You could easily jury-rig up a hand-held reader from commercial components and a bit of hard-hack know-how. And brute force decrypting anything from that era should be doable on a modern laptop.

Any custom system is safe, provided the enemy doesn't know how it works. But security-by-antiquity is a particularly bad example of security-by-obscurity given the likelihood of information leakage over time by people who didn't realise that their systems were still in use (particularly if they were never told what they were used for.) And chances are, your own intelligence people aren't even going to know what to listen for: "Yeah, just some hobbyists talking about early '70s computer technology. Disregard."

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Agares]

I would nto be surprised if that is one of the main reasons why they never upgraded. Who in their right mind would want nukes connected to the internet? I know I sure wouldn't.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[gstoddart]

USB or SATA hookup?

Steam turbine with wooden cogs would be my guess.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[FatLittleMonkey]

pwnd.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Agares]

I wouldn't say that the security lies in obscurity. The real security lies in the fact that they do not let anyone without clearance near the nukes. Which can be a good form of security if done right.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Anonymous Coward]

" I would shutter any time I got a call from one of them"

Take a picture? Close your store?

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[lowen]

50 pin Shugart would be the most useful, unless you really really need DEC RX01 or RX02.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[The Grim Reefer]

I inherited an old Tandy 6000 computer running Xenix which had an 8" drive back in the early 1990s, and I remember even then they were special order items. At that point high density 5.25" inch and 3.5" drives were coming into their own.

By the early 1990's 5.25" floppy disks were antiquated and 3.5" had been the standard for some time.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[cheddarlump]

It worked for Galactica.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[jmyers]

I would shut closed my brain, much like when posting to /. I shudder to think what the world would be like without grammar nazi's.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[gnupun]

Not so much. This is actually more along the lines of "If it aint broken, don't fix it".

Or, "it's okay if it's broken, as long as it's not connected to the internet."

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[4wdloop]

And this is hard with the very floppy 8" disks...they do not work well after being folded to fit in the pocket...

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's next-to-impossible to hack one of these missile control systems if they're not connected to the internet and code must be loaded on 70's era floppy disks (which are next-to-impossible for Joe Bloggs to get hold of)

You mean that the missile control system is like a uranium enrichment centrifuge?

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[LWATCDR]

The same as a world without lawyers...

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[FlyHelicopters]

Since it is secure via remote hack and secure again a USB drop, then your only remaining option is a local intrusion.

That is when the guys with guns come in handy, and the military is good at that. :)

Are places like Ft. Hood secure? No. Is a nuclear missile silo secure? I dam well hope so...

If not, then I'd agree there is a problem.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno, i guess their'd be alot of apostrophe's.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[NormAtHome]

Yeah, you really have to watch out for those radical groups since you never know what they're capable of! (you made my day with that ha ha!)

Re: Security through Antiquity?

[Talderas]

The Internet is a series of tubes.... and everyone knows all the vulnerabilities come from the Internet so anything with tubes is really vulnerable.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Albanach]

But all of those protections are still available with modern equipment. There would be no need to hook it up to the internet or keep it somewhere insecure.

So the only difference is the old technology, which leads to parts wearing out, capacitors blowing, and stuff needing replaced, yet the components to replace them may not be readily available. So then you have to improvise and possibly amend the hardware and code to accommodate new and different parts. But now you're integrating modern and ancient equipment on systems where everyone who designed them is either retired or dead. Now many of the advantages presented by your failure to upgrade have become liabilities.

Frankly if Windows is sufficient to run nuclear powered battleships, it should be possible to run the land-based nuclear weapons on something more up to date. It's quite possible to do that and maintain all the physical layers of security already in place.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[cellocgw]

I would shut closed my brain, much like when posting to /. I shudder to think what the world would be like without grammar nazi's.

Not to mention the Apostrophe Hunters.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[schlachter]

well, you might get a bug in your code.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[binarylarry]

That would probably be the most effective way to stop judgement day.

Kill the fucking guy that's buddies with someone at Cyberdyne Systems, preventing the IT upgrade of doom and keep the military installation running on good old fashion 60's technology.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[lgw]

On site, just open a panel, swap out a cable, bypass the whole control system.

Just so you know, when you open that panel, you're dead. They have antipersonnel mines built in, in case of unauthorized access to the panel. ICBM security doesn't fuck around.

This is the sort of security that involves lethal countermeasures, and yes, they thought of that. That too. There were geeks involved in the planning, so that other thing you think is clever? Lethal countermeasures.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[cusco]

Started college in 1992, 5 1/4" drives were still the most common, most of the ones in the computer lab were only 360K. They refreshed half of the computers in the lab the next year, so most of the machines then could read dual sided disks, and half of them also had 3 1/2" drives. It was finally 1995 when all the machines could read double-sided double-density 3 1/2" drives, and quite a few of them still had 5 1/2" drives as well since that's what students (and most of the profs) still had in their home machines.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[mrex]

All jokes aside, it actually is fairly secure against some types of intrusions.

And in all likelihood, *much* less secure against others. This strategy is a textbook example of the "security through obscurity" approach. Translated from Brass-to-English, what General Weinstein said was, "hurr durr, nobody remembers how our shit works so we're unhackable". That's fucking stupid.

Maybe the processes really are well-architected and reasonably secure, and the General is just dumbing it down for a lay audience. It's possible to accomplish that with older technology. But the mentality that says "we're secure BECAUSE we're using older technology" hints at an unnerving gap in understanding what constitutes legitimate IT security measures.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[cusco]

A lot of the communications, if not most of them, will be via serial ports. No encryption, minimal error checking, no possibility to ensure the continual continuity of the cabling. In the time period when these systems were installed no one monitored the integrity of j-boxes or conduit connections. If you have physical access then you have the ability to take over the communications channel, and the ability to splice into the comm channel to snoop it until you have a good understanding of the system. Not something that anyone would bother with in real life, but Ian Fleming could probably do something with it.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[PRMan]

Sell them on eBay. You might be surprised.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Dahan]

We still manufacturer magnetic thin films on flexible media, for the last few 3.5 inch floppies and other purposes, and I'd imagine that you could get away with putting a very low resolution magnetic pattern on film capable of a much finer one (though not the reverse)

Not necessarily--not all magnetic thin films are the same. Ones capable of storing a higher density of magnetic patterns have a higher coercivity (i.e., it takes a higher magnetic field strength to change the magnetization). The write heads in drives designed to write on lower coercivity media aren't strong enough to write on the high coercivity media. Which is why you can't use a 5.25" HD (1.2MB) floppy in a DD (360KB) drive.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[anotheryak]

Sure, it's terrible energy-inefficient, and the support costs must be through the roof, but i'm more comfortable knowing that the missile control systems are running on pre-internet (and even ARPANET?) systems. It means the many enemies of the US cannot just hack into the missile control systems and start armageddon. No internet, no hacking, no problem.

Why do you think it is so inefficient? They probably have something around a 4MHz processor ticking all it's clock cycles away on a 5V clock, but it's stilll more efficient than a quad-core 3GHz machine, even with a 1.5V power supply.

I also don't get:

Sure, it's terrible energy-inefficient, and the support costs must be through the roof

The USAF has scrapped dozens of silos as part of the SALT treaty, so that's a lot of spares. And a lot of this old big iron gear just keeps running. The Atari 2600 was a cheap consumer-grade part, but it keeps going. These silos are not much older and all of their gear was made to the best spec possible. I doubt it needs much repair at all.

No hard disks spinning at 7200 RPM. No mega-GPU graphics cards. The 110V motor on the 8" floppy drives is probably one of the biggest power drains on the whole system. How much heat do you get out of the back of your PC? Now compare that with an Apple ][, Atari 800, PET or TRS-80.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[tchdab1]

>>I don't think Joe Bloggs is the one trying to breach a US nuclear silo.

Profile fail.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[anotheryak]

In the time period when these systems were installed no one monitored the integrity of j-boxes or conduit connections.

That's total crap. Do you really think the USAF would be so stupid to let their entire defense system fall prey to one Soviet agent with a shovel and a pair of wire cutters? Do you really think you are smarter than all the engineers from all the defense and communication companies who installed these silos as part of the national defense system? Or one crazy guy to short two wires and nuke Minsk?

All the cables running out of the control center towards the silos are protected by a pneumatic jacket. If the pressure changes, they know the line has been messed with and an armored security truck comes rushing out. Ask any farmer in North Dakota who put his backhoe into one. The telephone company has dealt with this sort of thing for decades on analog cable without the benefit of encryption.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[davester666]

Ah, the 1541 5.25" floppy drive, with special head-banging technology included.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[krept]

I think you're really not giving enough credit to those in charge of security auditing in the DoD. First, this may be the way the general likes to explain it, but I don't think it's entirely true, that their tactic is based on security through obscurity. Second, I don't believe those in charge of the auditing would let something as simple as not having the right device to read an old floppy foil their intrusion attempt. It may be old, but I'm willing to bet it's just as secure now as it ever was.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Tofof]

Have a source for the mines-in-panels claim? Intriguing idea but I can't find anything about it.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Darinbob]

What about reliability of the media? They never were that great in the first place and I'd trust a 9 track reel to reel for data over an 8" floppy.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[The Grim Reefer]

Started college in 1992, 5 1/4" drives were still the most common, most of the ones in the computer lab were only 360K. They refreshed half of the computers in the lab the next year, so most of the machines then could read dual sided disks, and half of them also had 3 1/2" drives. It was finally 1995 when all the machines could read double-sided double-density 3 1/2" drives, and quite a few of them still had 5 1/2" drives as well since that's what students (and most of the profs) still had in their home machines.

I guess it depends on where you went to school and how long they took to get the hardware in. The first Apple Macs never had a 5.25. They all shipped with 3.5. I still remember in 1993 finding a box of 5.25 floppy disks and not having anything to read them on. I ended up buying two off of somebody on Usenet. I'm pretty sure it was because they were hard to find, or due to lower demand the prices had gotten outrageous by that time. Even so, I don't recall seeing any new computers with 5.25" floppy drives for some time before that.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[oh_my_080980980]

Your argument is based on the assumption that the military can't get replacement parts. I would not rest my argument on that. There's a little thing known as a defense contractors. You know companies that will build anything to spec. Did you know that the F-15 was introduced in 1976 and is still in use today! The point being that age does not determine a thing's usefulness.

FYI the USS Yorktown had be towed back to port when Windows crashed. So no Windows on naval vessels, let alone running missile silos, is not a good thing. Pinhead.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Darinbob]

I knew someone who used to work in the Blue Cube (air force base that monitored early warning systems) in the early 90s, and was told that they still used lots of PDPs, sat at metal desks, and other stuff from the 70s even though they were sitting in the heart of silicon valley.

Last I saw an 8" floppy was for the PDP-11 console that sat inside a VAX cabinet in order to help it boot up.

Now how to fix this stuff? During glasnost era I presume you could second source parts from USSR clones... You could replace the entire system and stick it on a chip and have it all done as a student project. But these computers weren't used as general purpose computers, a lot of the reasons they're kept around is because of a specific hardware interface to other equipment and because it requires people with high security clearances and a budget to design replacements (ie, no student projects). Probably a requirement too to be resistent to electromagnetic pulses which is a plus for a lot of older equipment.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Darinbob]

They probably dragged out some old floppies to show the reporters which hid the fact that they're really using XP and Internet Explorer behind the blast doors.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[cusco]

Oof. I worked at Radio Shack during the winter of '93-'94, we were still selling the last few Tandy computers with dual 5 1/2" floppy drives and no hard drive. Northern Michigan, so they were able to foist that crap off on unsuspecting consumers there. Please note that **I** did not sell them and discouraged customers from even considering them, but my co-irkers had no such scruples.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Darinbob]

However if you get a PC for the same job (ie, a computer evolved from a hobbyist stance and which was designed by a collection of cost cutters and low bidders) then it will wear out long before those older minicomputers are dead, and be considered obsolete before that happens, and you'll be stuck in a never ending upgrade cycle like corporate people. If you do find a PC designed for rugged military work, then it will be nearly impossible to get parts for it when they wear out anyway as the company will be out of business. If you avoid the whole PC route then everything else has an even more risky maintenance back end.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[azadrozny]

Similar to my experience. We replaced most of our machines with 5 1/4" in 97 I recall. We did keep one lab's worth of machines around with both types, so you could use/transfer your older formats. I recall many students coming to the help desk with bent, folded, otherwise mangled 5 1/4" disks (and 3 1/2" for that matter) who wanted us to fix them. They were often SOL. I felt bad for most of them.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[DarthVain]

Er. ya. My thoughts exactly.

1) If I am some terminal operator, how comfortable am I that an antipersonnel mine is planted under a panel next to my leg that is 50 years old...
2) If I am an IT technician, do I get a bible as part of my loadout that I pray that technical specifications and documents are way more accurate than everywhere else.

Though this certainly gives a lot of credence why IT professionals (Cyber Engineers?) see "no need" to upgrade it... (ever)

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

True, though if you were trying to load a program onto the nuclear-control-widget, you might be able to get away with a read-only disk.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[The Grim Reefer]

Wasn't that around the time of the "You've got questions, we've got answers" ad campaign? ;-)

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Cramer]

Actually, it's more a matter of "security by not connecting it to the god damn internet"

(surprising how secure a thing can be when you have to actually touch it to use it.)

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Cramer]

And the pegasus... they hadn't gotten around to loading Baltar's BS defense system update. But it was otherwise as modern as anything in the fleet.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[MachineShedFred]

This is the military we're talking about. They probably have a fucking warehouse of parts somewhere at Minot for that shit that was purchased on the original contract. Something goes bad, they dispatch a jet to deliver one within hours.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Mr. Slippery]

Are places like Ft. Hood secure? No. Is a nuclear missile silo secure? I dam well hope so...

I'm sure the parts of Ft. Hood that contain things that the military thinks are valuable are secure. The parts inhabited by cannon fodder, not so much.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[MachineShedFred]

I have an 8" floppy disk hanging on the side of my cube. Should I be watching for terrorists?

Nah, it's probably the NSA I should be worryidfsaal;dfjsal; fj809-7398hiuskl.....}{{}|

+++NO CARRIER

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[AK Marc]

My memory of the switchover was that I had Windows 3.0 on 5.25" and Win 95 on 3.5". I never owned 3.11, so I don't have the disk type burned forever in my memory.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[sillybilly]

There was actually some major spy case with data being stored in unused areas of the floppies. As most harddrives and USB key-chain drives are chip-based, and the only chip you can trust is the one that you make, floppies are secure in the sense that they isolate data storage from the logic that could do anything with it. And once one logic fails, such as a floppy drive, you have the option to carry the floppy from it to a different floppy disk but you cannot do that with a harddisk. Optical disks can also be separated from the logic, however the ink based CD-Rs degrade fast over time, but not the RW kind base, calchogenide glass, which does not degrade. I wish they invented some chalcogen glasses that are not scarce-material based. The biggest issue with floppies is constant mechanical wear as the read-write magnetic head touches the disk surface with a given pressure, but because of the low density, floppy head movement errors are tolerable, unlike with optical disks, where tiny laser-head misalignments create a failed read.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I'll bet that somewhere in the DoD network is a very small manufacturing system for new disks...it would be pretty easy to just buy i off the market back in the 1980-90's. There is no way you could even store those old disks for 20+ years, even if they where blank. Perhaps they can still get the magnetic film inside of them made, and they just make their own sleeve, and replace the floppies as needed. There is probably a warehouse of old, electronically cleaned and hardened floppies and PC's just for these silos...since if done right the physical electronics should stay ready-to-go in a properly controlled environment.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

in high school I did that to one of my friends Wizardry 5.25 floppies on purpose. He wouldn't shut up about his character, everyone was getting annoyed...so I picked up the disk and said "oh, I can defeat them" and mangled it. The teacher wasn't happy, but I think he too found it funny....that was 1990-91.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

One thing I just thought of, it would make a Terminator-style AI launch impossible...unless the AI first injected code into the floppies, then waited for them to be loaded into the various ICBM silos...

But really you would only need 5-10 ICBM's with multiple warheads as a surprise to knock us out long enough to finish us off with drones...so maybe a handful of subs could be hacked (or probably all of them if an AI could get into one). The only real thing Skynet needs right now is ground forces, some type of general worker-bot to take the human's place in places that aren't automated yet.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Jarik C-Bol]

When I worked in the 'media center' in college, (about 12 years ago) The school went through a 'get rid of old shit' phase, and were getting rid of some old student records, and they at one point had us degaussing box after box of those 8" floppies. I pulled the magnetic disk out of the inside of one, degaussed it, and kept the outside, because it was such a relic. To this day, doubt degaussing them was worth the effort, because i don't think anyone else who saw the stack even knew what they where, much less where to find a drive and machine that could read them.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[NicBenjamin]

You got an alternative?

Any modern technology based on consumer-level stuff is just as easy to hack, because every goddamn cybercriminal spends 100% of his goddamn time hacking it.

Any specialized new technology would take years to develop, cost 50% more then anyone in the private sector would pay (this is the government), have to interface with a missile old enough to be most missileers' grandparents, and would almost certainly not work in version 1. I do not like the concept of "not working" and a nuclear-goddamn-missile silo. The juxtaposition is simply not harmonious.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[NicBenjamin]

He's not the only one.

AQ would probably love to have a guy in a silo. It would scare the shit out of me even if the MPs shot him 500 feet from the entrance. And they're quite familiar with the modern IT security cat and mouse game, because over most of the Middle East they are the mice. OTOH they got no clue what to do with floppies bigger then 3.5."

The Russians et al. could easily get through the security through obscurity by buying old parts on eBay and having electrical engineering PhDs analyze them, but then the Russians et al. could do that shit to almost anything we come up with. The Chinese would probably have detailed sepcs before the design was officially approved, and be more familiar with it then the Air Force by the time a non-beta version was implemented.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[dublin]

Oh sure, you think we're that easy to fool? Trying to get us to use your 8" disks with hidden backdoors encoded in them? No thank you. We get all of our supplies from official channels, which source from the IBM division called Lenovo.

Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein
Commander, U.S. Strategic Command

Are you sure? You sound an awful lot like Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper to me...

[CRM114]This message authenticated by CRM-114 discriminator[/CRM114]

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Greyfox]

It's actually just a guy with a machine gun. He just likes to pretend he's an antipersonnel mine. It's very awkward when he occasionally explodes on someone.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[HornWumpus]

When I was kid, we used to hunt rabbit around the missile silos in western Missouri.

We'd wave at the cameras, occasionally sing a verse of 'kill da wabbit' to keep the security guys entertained. They never even came out to bother us. Tall fences, big doors.

What's the worst we could have done?

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Greyfox]

Same here, Old PDP system at RPI back in '87, for an assembly language programming class. We had to type the bootstrap sequence to the console in octal to get the system to jmp to the first instruction on the floppy. I still have the book for that class. It postulates in the forward that one day 16 bit systems might be widespread but it doesn't anticipate that 32 bit systems will ever be inexpensive enough to enjoy widespread adoption.

It'd be a bummer if you had to type the bootstrap sequence in to launch your missile. I assume they solve that problem by leaving the system on all the time.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[johnrpenner]

galactica computers werent secure because they were old — what they didnt want is to have the machines NETWORKED.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[rjune]

Perhaps we could work something out in July. My wife wants them out of the house.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[HornWumpus]

Silos don't have 500 foot parameters back when I was kid hunting rabbit between them.

I don't think it's changed. Tall fences, cameras and a crete/steel door you weren't getting though in a week with explosives.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Belial6]

My guess is that you could do all of the unsafe surfing you wanted. You could specifically look for malware infested sites, and a C64 would still be safe on the internet.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[HornWumpus]

All accurate; except the silos are generally scattered around the countryside, each in it's own razor wire fenced enclosure.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Belial6]

Consider with modern equipment, I could walk into a facility with a microSD stuffed in my nose. You are going to have to work a lot harder to pass those doors with an 8" floppy stuffed into an orifice.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Belial6]

With an 8" x 8" device stuffed into some orifice.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[badboy_tw2002]

LOL don't forget Clippy! "I see you're attempting to launch a thermonuclear warhead. Would you like me to check those coordinates?"

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[geekoid]

3.5 in 1984. 400K.
Of course, the Mac wasn't exactly a a large market share so it's no surprise not a lot of people would remember they had a floppy.

3.5 didn't really get into wide release until early 90s. I think we where still putting both in new non Apple system in 93-94.
(The Mac was a PC by parlance of the time)
Now if you excuse me I need to get a new onion for my belt.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[geekoid]

"You could likely simulate the entire system on a damn Arduino. "
Let me save you some time: No, you can't.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Mr. Freeman]

It's not just a matter of secrecy, it's a matter of absolute reliability. Student projects are unacceptable because there is no way in hell a student project can be tested and reviewed to the extent necessary for use in such an application. These things absolutely, positively, have to work every single time with zero problems. There's no time for troubleshooting when you have to launch a retaliatory attack after detecting the enemy (whoever it might be) launching their missiles at you.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[shutdown -p now]

You'd get quite a few people fighting to give you cash for them if you just put them up it on eBay.

Or you could ask the folks at the Living Computer Museum if they might be interested. I don't recall seeing 8" floppies last time I visited the place.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Lonewolf666]

Also, floppies in general are disappearing. In 2010 for instance, Sony ended production of the 3 1/2" floppy.

A company I worked for until recently was still producing a device with DOS based software and 3 1/2" floppies a few years ago.
Due to lack of floppy suppliers, they had to switch to pseudo-floppy drives that used specially formatted USB sticks and pretended to be floppy drives to the PC. And they were lucky that workaround existed. AFAIK it was developed for users of old but expensive manufacturing equipment that had the same problem, who did not want to scrap the machines.

I believe that particular device is out of production by now, but this illustrates the difficulties in using such obsolete hardware. Of course, Strategic Air Command might have the budget to keep some small scale manufacturing going ;-)

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Darinbob]

So world destroyed versus world destroyed. It really only matters as a deterence if you can prove that your system is absolutely reliable and will never fail as opposed to a system the military bought on sale from Best Buy.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[FatLittleMonkey]

It may be possible for the primary missile console. It's in a vault, manned by two specially chosen and armed airmen who are authorised to shoot each other if their partner causes a problem, designed so that it's physically impossible for a single person to operate alone, etc etc. It wouldn't surprise me if they had actual honest-to-god booby-traps in the console itself.

When doing maintenance, you switch out missile ops to the second control room, send in bomb-techs to turn off the booby-traps, then and only then send in your console maintenance tech to replace the malfunctioning board/etc. All under continuous armed guard.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[FatLittleMonkey]

One thing I just thought of, it would make a Terminator-style AI launch impossible...unless the AI first injected code into the floppies, then waited for them to be loaded into the various ICBM silos...

No, Skynet doesn't need to get into the silo systems, it only needs to hijack the more centralised authorisation system. Ie, it would send the authorisation codes to all the silos and subs. The silo and sub crews would mostly follow their orders. If even as few as a third of the crews didn't question their orders via another (unauthorised but hander to spoof) channel, you'd still cause Russia to respond, triggering Judgement Day.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[azadrozny]

I recall that Win95 came with a crazy number of floppies, on the order of 15-20. Or was that NT that I am thinking of? Thank god for the invention of the CD-ROM.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[azadrozny]

Some friends and I had found a copy of The Oregon Trail for the Apple II. We played it so much that we wore the disk out. Good times!

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[mr_mischief]

Sounds good.

Re: Security through Antiquity?

[phocion]

"On site, just open a panel, swap out a cable, bypass the whole control system." Except there is no "panel". The cables you're talking about connecting to are 100 feet underground, behind multiple 5 feet thick concrete doors, connected in hardened conduits to the existing console, and there are men with guns guarding those doors. So no, that's not going to happen. Nice try.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[cusco]

We had answers all right. If my co-irkers didn't know they'd just make shit up. May not be the right answer, but it was an answer.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[cusco]

(Working from failing memory)

Windows 3.1 - 5-6 floppies for DOS + 6 for Windows

Windows 3.11 - Above + 2 for networking + 1 for TCP/IP

Win95 - 15

NT 3.51 - 16

NT 4.0 - 18 or 19

Office 4.3 - 28 floppies

Imagine my pleasure when I found you could just expand all of the floppies into a single network folder. Then I could boot off a floppy, sys and format the HD, and copy the folder to the local drive before running Setup off the hard drive. If I used NetBEUI instead of TCP/IP I didn't even need a second floppy.

Re:Security through Antiquity?

[Druegan]

I dunno how secure they are.. I mean, I heard that Kevin Mitnick could launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a phone..... It was all over the news.. I mean, the government wouldn't lie about something *that* serious!

Security through obscurity

[Anonymous Coward]

Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world.

No, they don't. Claiming obsolete hardware and software is more secure is just a thinly veiled security through obscurity claim. There are other claims here; the machines are airgapped, and I suspect that the physical site security is pretty good; but the use of old software and hardware adds nothing at all to that.

Re:Security through obscurity

[syntheticmemory]

At least they are no longer using a clay tablet reader.

Re:Security through obscurity

[mrchaotica]

There are other claims here; the machines are airgapped, and I suspect that the physical site security is pretty good; but the use of old software and hardware adds nothing at all to that.

You have to admit, the old hardware makes it hard for some random officer to violate the air gap by plugging in his USB-using cellphone.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Resol]

Well, I suppose it's possible that the systems were small enough back then that they were able to prove that the systems were correct to essentially eliminate bugs, but as you point out, once past the physical security, I suspect there's a number of new techniques that could be brought to compromise the systems - even without exploiting what might be called traditional flaws.

Re: Security through obscurity

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of old machines adds quite a bit: today's large USB sticks allow a hostile force to hide complex software. You simply can't hide much if neither the media not the machine have much space to spare.

Re:Security through obscurity

[gurps_npc]

Old software does have an advantage in that it is more thoroughly bug tested. But that's about it.

Re:Security through obscurity

[The123king]

Sure, you can get the same security by isolating modern machines from a network and loading code using USB's or CD's and DVD's, but why fix something that's not broken? These systems only have one job, and they were a significant investment when they were installed, and the still do their job pretty effectively. The US therefore has little to no incentive to upgrade the systems already in place.

The other thing worth mentioning is the simplicity of these systems. Older hardware is suprisingly easy to service, modify and alter purely because they're so primitive. Sure all those discreet components might be less reliable, but when something does go wrong, it's often a case of a bit of solder and a new component, instead of buying and installing a whole new SoC or daughterboard.

Re:Security through obscurity

[MightyMartian]

Indeed. The principle security here seems to be that they are in a well-secured facility and are airgapped. Windows 95 would be relatively secure in such an environment.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, it does. The fact that you cannot load data on these machines using a USB device does mean that they are more secure. The fact that anybody carrying around something that would allow them to quickly and easily load software (whether malicious or not) onto these machines would be obvious to anyone watching them does in fact increase security. The security does not come from the fact that the hardware is old, but from the fact that attempts to load software onto it are obvious. And on the software side it is not the fact that it is old that adds security, rather it is that the people who are knowledgeable enough about it to hack it are extremely rare. In both cases, these facts are a result of them being old, but the age is not what he is claiming makes them more secure. Rather it is a side effect of them being old.

Re:Security through obscurity

[CanHasDIY]

Sure, you can get the same security by isolating modern machines from a network and loading code using USB's or CD's and DVD's,

Except that's not the same security - Anybody these days can get their hands on USB drives, CDs, and DVDs, but you'd be hard pressed to find a working 8" floppy, drive, and computer to write it with.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Xest]

Actually I'd argue that's not entirely true. It's far easier to verify there's no back door in vastly simpler hardware and software from back then than there is in the vastly more complex hardware and operating systems of today.

That was a time before I believe we even had computers automatically attempting to optimise circuitry - it was all hand done and the reasons for designs were entirely understandable and known by humans.

Back then processors did exactly what you told them to, nothing more, and nothing less, with none of that fancy optimisation shit!

I think there's a lot to be said for that by way of security, it's far harder to slip something subtle and subversive in when there's far less complexity.

Re:Security through obscurity

[bluefoxlucid]

Actually, you're wrong.

These old networks are airgapped in so many ways, not just by removing the CAT6 to the Internet. The disks themselves are airgapped, as they're not constantly in systems which can read them; likewise, there's a huge airgap between a spy and a reader: if the disks are stolen, they need a huge honkin' machine to read them, or they need to use base facilities which have cameras and guards. Further, the media is low-density: you need to physically transport a truckload to get what fits on a modern CD-R, much less on a 64GB microSDHC.

Just as with 1000 iteration hashing, these large systems impose a time limitation on mass copy. If you want to access this top-secret file, it's merely 15kB of text stored on a 40kB disk. If you want to steal the wealth of information archived here, you must find the disks you want and then copy each of them. If you want it all, you must spend weeks if not months copying each individual disk to a portable flash drive.

There are some real difficulties involved in stealing this much data in this form. That provides a layer of security by requiring high-visibility or excessively slow methods of data access, both of which sharply increase risk in espionage. You are more likely to catch and interrupt any significant espionage attempt in this model than in a model where we put all our stuff on a USB drive that's taken to a modern machine in a secure room.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Xest]

I don't think that's true, how long would it take you to ensure no backdoor had been slipped into even the Windows 95 binaries you're installing on the machine compared to auditing the source code and compilation process of even say an early version of DOS? let alone something even more simplistic again.

The fact is more code = more chance of missing malicious code. Older hardware and software almost always means smaller codebases, more simplicity, and less scope for malicious code.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Zordak]

once past the physical security

Good luck with that. And please give St. Peter my regards.

Re:Security through obscurity

[I'm New Around Here]

At least they are no longer using a clay tablet reader.

Did they replace that with the CueCat reader?

Re:Security through obscurity

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

At least they are no longer using a clay tablet reader.

I'll say one thing for clay tablets: few other formats just shrug when somebody burns your civilization to the ground...

Re:Security through obscurity

[Collective 0-0009]

I used to work for SAC, specifically on SACDIN. I was a programmer for the system, but turned into network admin when they told us to complete the air gap and setup an offline network just for the source code, testing and administration of the system. I am not sure how much I am allowed to say, as my security clearance restricts me for like 75 years or something. But since most of what I will tell you can already be found here: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/..., I figure I won't get a knock on the door.

SACCS and SACDIN are nearly the same, often interchanged in terminology. Most of us called it SACCS. We were the BALLS. That kind of stuff went on and on... it never got old.

The systems are not nearly as outdated as you think. The endpoints are old, but the stuff in the middle is much newer. The code is reviewed every 6 months. There is probably code in there from the 60's, but it has been reviewed hundreds of times. There is new stuff and changes all the time.

There are modern computers that the programmers code with. There are modern computers in the links from SAC to silo. They are hardended and locked down, but let's be honest, the airmen have physical access. That's why you need a clearance just to touch the computers that make the code that runs the network.

That's all I have to say about that.

Re: Security through obscurity

[FatLittleMonkey]

However, you can simulate an entire old hardware system in software on a tiny new system. Open a panel, swap out a cable and bypass all your antique security entirely.

Re:Security through obscurity

[camperdave]

...but you'd be hard pressed to find a working 8" floppy, drive, and computer to write it with.

Brand new in box on ebay for $195

Re:Security through obscurity

[Agares]

I agree with you on this. They could just use newer stuff, but just keep if off the grid like they have with the current system. The only reason why it hasn't been hacked is for the simple fact that they let no one touch it. That has always been a good form of security when you think about it. If you don't want to get hacked do not connect it to anything, and definitely don’t let anyone touch it as well.

Re:Security through obscurity

[CanHasDIY]

...but you'd be hard pressed to find a working 8" floppy, drive, and computer to write it with.

Brand new in box on ebay for $195

If it was that easy, one would presume you would have included a link to the auction page.

Of course, the fact that one has to scour sites like Ebay to find an (allegedly) working unit (and not the media, nor the computer necessary to interface with the drive, that also need to be working units) only serves to strengthen my point - you don't have to do nearly as much legwork to acquire flash drives and blank optical media.

Re:Security through obscurity

[AmiMoJo]

If they are even half-way competent any air-gapped machines won't have exposed USB ports.

People laughed when they saw North Korean computers that looked ancient, but actually they were probably just modern PCs in hardened secure enclosures where the keyboard and mouse are built in and there are no external ports. The US probably has machines that look just like that for nuclear control systems.

Re: Security through obscurity

[armanox]

You'd need to know a bit more then that - the cables being used, for example.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Collective 0-0009]

They don't use the floppies for data storage. This isn't a data storage system, it's a communication system. The floppies are used to update the code, not much else. The messages sent are nearly so tiny as to probably fit on one of these disks. It doesn't take many packets to say "bomb the bastards at x99.999999 y88.888888" or some such.

The most devastating thing that could happen is a message is spoofed. Closely followed by a message not being delivered.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Yebyen]

Come on, you can't tell us you had SACCS and BALLS in your place of work and then fail to tell us what either of these acronyms actually stand for. What am I supposed to do, google this stuff?

Re:Security through obscurity

[bunratty]

Correlation is not causation. I don't see any claim that the systems are secure because they're obsolete. I think the fact that they use technology from many decades ago means that they are simple, and the fact that they are simple means it was easy to make them secure and show that they are secure today. I think we could just as easily make a secure system today if we use modern technology, as long as we keep everything very simple. It's slapping on layer after layer of general purpose hardware and code that leads to many security problems.

Re:Security through obscurity

[ImprovOmega]

Super glue in all the USB ports pretty well prohibits them from being used and is cheap and effective. You'd need a PS/2 mouse and keyboard though.

Re: Security through obscurity

[FatLittleMonkey]

The guys who created Stuxnet were not script-kiddies. They knew exactly what they were sabotaging. It seems reasonable to assume that someone attacking a nuclear missile silo is motivated.

With old systems, a lot of the details have likely escaped into the public domain, simply because no-one else realised 30 year old hardware was still being used for such systems. Your own intelligence services probably wouldn't register if someone started collecting information about such old system (the civilian versions, anyway), collecting hardware, discussing it online, and quizzing old timers. They would be noise amongst other old-system hobbyists and collectors.

What that means is, as others have said, the only real security is the well-defended airgap. If someone figures out a way to breach that, you are pwnd.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Collective 0-0009]

If the term "CaneBall" means anything to you, then we know each other. I know there is at least one of my former co-workers on this site!

Re:Security through obscurity

[Shakrai]

you don't have to do nearly as much legwork to acquire flash drives and blank optical media.

Intelligence agencies do nothing but "legwork", 24/7/365, with a staff of thousands (small countries) to hundreds of thousands (Great Powers).....

Re:Security through obscurity

[MightyMartian]

If the computer is airgapped and guarded by guys with guns and orders to prevent (even shoot) anyone that comes with a thousand yards of the machines, I'd wager they'd be safe.

Re:Security through obscurity

[CanHasDIY]

Doesn't change the absolute fact that modern technology is easier to acquire and deploy than obsolete stuff.

Really, I'm not sure what point you guys are trying to argue here, considering the content of my original post...

Re:Security through obscurity

[rjune]

SAC had lots of acronyms like LRBWYP. Let's see if you can google that one.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Xest]

You're missing the point. What if they've already been compromised with a timed exploit when they were originally set up at the facility? what if the hardware already had a timed exploit before it even reached the facility?

Guards can sit their with their guns all they want, it's still going to be going off behind them and there wouldn't be shit they could do. They probably wouldn't even know until it was too late.

Re:Security through obscurity

[cusco]

Probably shouldn't Google that from work, and do NOT do an image search. Well, unless you're into that . . .

Re: Security through obscurity

[jcochran]

Critical cables tend to be run in pressurized pipes. With pressure sensors. Pressure drops = alarm = lots of unfriendly people with guns arriving very soon.

Re:Security through obscurity

[cusco]

If my back door is 85 feet underground and secured by a battalion of Marines I'm not going to worry about locking it.

Re:Security through obscurity

[rochrist]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-V... Asked and granted.

Re:Security through obscurity

[CanHasDIY]

From the item description:

This item has not been powered up or tested. Sold as is, but there are no visible signs of damage

So, if you're lucky, the drive isn't toast... now all you have to do is find working media, a computer to interface the drive with, and oh yea, the source code for all the software used in a US military nuclear missile silo facility, which I doubt is OSS.

If you're not lucky, you just spent $150 bucks on a vintage paperweight. Thus, my original premise remains unblemished: using vintage computing equipment is inherently more secure than using modern equipment due to the scarcity of functioning, vintage hardware.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Agent0013]

I would imagine the clay tablet becomes even better when civilization gets burned to the ground. It would turn from a clay tablet into a ceramic tablet, which is even stronger.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Darinbob]

Back in the early 80s I saw a computer designed for field use in the military. I was a bit green at the time so a lot of it flew over my head, but I seem to recall that it was intended to be PDP-11 compatible. Big lumpy heavy metal box (heavy enough that most of it was probaby for protection). All the interfaces to it appeared to be coax cable jacks and similar ports, with nothing similar to what was on a conventional mini/micro, no keyboard (presumably you connected some sort of input peripheral in the field). I thought it was a type of radio system at first.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Bob the Super Hamste]

If my back door is 85 feet underground and secured by a battalion of Marines I'm not going to worry about locking it.

I'm sure there is a joke about that.

Re:Security through obscurity

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My understanding is that you do lose some to thermal cracking, internal steam in improperly dried tablets, and that sort of thing; but that is basically the reason why we have a (comparatively) massive canon of fertile crescent cuneiform, despite its creators being among the oldest in the known history of written language, and living in a pretty rough neighborhood where getting sacked and burned was a common occurrence. I'm not even sure that we have enough subject matter experts to read them all.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Xest]

And what will those marines do exactly if the malware was already present when it was put down there in the first place?

Unless you can be sure the software and hardware was free from existing vulnerability in the first place, and that no marines or other people allowed near have introduced anything since then the marines simply do not mean jack shit.

Re:Security through obscurity

[camperdave]

The point is that you wouldn't be "hard pressed" to find working 8" floppy equipment. Sure, it's not a simple as driving to the nearest convenience store and picking up a USB flash drive, but it's not as difficult as you make it seem. Media and hardware are available on eBay, and http://www.retrotechnology.com/ has info on connections, drivers, manuals etc. I'm sure there are other sites and vintage computer clubs out there as well.

Re: Security through obscurity

[AK Marc]

That's true of most things. Given a sufficiently powerful system and perfect knowledge, you can emulate a simpler system. But how do you get your simpler system into the base? How can you "swap the cable" without setting off every alarm in the place? They have physical security designed against such attacks, but you make it sound trivial.

Re:Security through obscurity

[cusco]

I'm puzzled. What is the problem if it is there? Unless there is some scheduled task to do some nefarious thing autonomously malware is harmless on an isolated machine (except for wasted CPU cycles.)

Re:Security through obscurity

[Yebyen]

I don't know, did you try googling it? I get some URL shorteners, a korean site that appears to be selling Gucci sneakers, and a place next to "nude japanese lolitas" if I add 'sac' to the query

Re:Security through obscurity

[rochrist]

That was just the first listing. There were many listings, some of them new and unopened.

Re:Security through obscurity

[dublin]

You laugh, but I found a CueCat when going through a drawer in my study over the weekend. Kinda thinking I ought to put it to work, just for old times' sake...

Re: Security through obscurity

[NicBenjamin]

That's what the Security Forces Squadron at the base is for. You don't get past them to the panel, which makes your simulated hardware system very incriminating evidence when they try your corpse.

Now if you have the ID/story to get past SF into the base in the first place, you still have to get into the missile silo. The one that's designed to be Armageddon-fucking-proof. So you aren't sneaking in through an access hatch. You have to convince someone to open the door. Then you have to find the place where the missileers are, which happens to be where all access hatches to the missile are, before you can even open the hatch.

So in other words you have to create a device that would be cool enough to be your Electrical Engineering dissertation, it has to be compatible with multiple systems that are extremely classified, and then you have to human engineer your way onto a base in front of dozens of people to even hook the damn thing up. Then you have tio accomplish whatever you want to accomplish while the guy is sitting there watching you, and monitoring his own systems. He's gonna notice he lost control when you hooked up your "diagnostic prototype" to the system, and if you don't unhook it he is duty-bound to kill your damn ass and unhook it himself.

Now let's say they were using a completely modern network of Open Source stuff. You still need the great story to get on-base, and in-building. But you don't need to be anywhere particularly interesting in the silo to get shit done. They let you in, then you let them forget about you, then you hook your laptop up to the network, and you can do whatever a normal hacker could do.

You can claim on the internet you could do the former. I sincerely doubt it. I doubt anyone, including the Russians, has an agent talented enough to walk onto to a US Nuclear base and convince the Airmen to let him/her hook something up and sit there while it destroys them. This human being simply does not exist.

OTOH, I have dealt with several hackers who were good enough at social engineering to get into a building once, and could wreak all kinds of havoc from it's network, provided they were familiar with the system.

Re:Security through obscurity

[dublin]

I've worked in aerospace plants doing work on black projects, and at at least one of them, even employees without any clearance had to "airlock" in and out of the plant, and briefcases and pockets were routinely searched.

At the very least, you had to open your briefcase and let the security officer (always armed) do a quick visual inspection of the contents. This was back before the fall of the Berlin Wall and later, the USSR (which is now making a comeback thanks to Obama and Putin, in that order) so violations were not only a firing offense, but one that would presumably get you a very uncomfortable interrogation. I expect it's pretty difficult to smuggle something as large as an 8" floppy out of (or into) a facility as secure as a nuclear missile silo.

As an aside, AF MissileMen are reportedly under orders to shoot the other officer in the silo if he goes off the rails. Now *that's* a security policy...

Re:Security through obscurity

[Macman408]

I would disagree conditionally; security through obscurity is bad if it is your only form of security, and it's bad against a determined, well-funded attacker, but it can still provide some amount of security. Requiring an attacker to acquire an 8-inch-floppy disk (and drive) might serve to deter $SCRIPT_KIDDIE from doing anything to your system, because frankly, it's a pain. It certainly won't do much to deter $FOREIGN_SPY; it'll be a nuisance and probably add time to their planning of an attack (which is still beneficial), but you obviously need other security measures that can prevent their access.

You might think of it like many of the forms of cryptography used online today - the whole point is to create a math problem that would be very difficult for a third party to solve backwards, where "very difficult" is defined in terms of the computation power a potential attacker might have and a period of time after which the encrypted information would no longer have value. This means that encrypted data isn't vulnerable to anybody living today; but some day, it will be. If your goal were to encrypt data for all time (or against somebody with unlimited resources), you would need a very different mechanism to "obscure" your data than today's typical encryption. Security through obscurity is obviously weaker, but it can help to prevent casual attacks. (Then again, so could all the other stuff you have to do to prevent the more determined attackers - so adding obscurity is not helpful, but having it naturally does carry some small value.)

Re:Security through obscurity

[kesuki]

also realize the nuclear 'football' that goes every where with the president is linked to networks all over the world thanks to satellites ground penetrating signals etc.

for security they only check the system where they are pretty sure no one can spy on the radio in the hopes that enemies can't learn to mimic the signals needed to launch a nuclear war from anywhere on the planet.

8" floppies wouldn't compensate for someone getting the launch codes and the frequency to launch from global networks.

Re: Security through obscurity

[FatLittleMonkey]

Bypassing a pressure-based system is probably easier than spoofing the missile console. If the attackers are capable of the latter, I wouldn't count of the former defeating them.

But your talking about that does bring up the idea that the attacker might not need access to the hyper-protected console room. There may be a cable running down a utility corridor somewhere. Bypass the anti-tamper system, bypass the console. Your agent only needs to pose as a maintenance person, not a missile airman. It may reduce the difficulty of breaching the silo security. (Hopefully they are paranoid enough that this is impossible, but it wouldn't be the first important security system that invested all their effort in securing the front door.)

Re:Security through obscurity

[Xest]

A computer is going to serve a purpose, whether that's to be connected directly to the launch systems of a nuclear weapon, whether it's to simply calculate inputs needed to define the weapons trajectories, whether it's to give the order to launch, or whether it's simply to provide a list of who is and isn't allowed to enter the site - it's going to be there for a reason.

The idea that nothing could therefore happen on such a system of any harm is silly. It could trigger a launch, give false trajectories, give permission of access to someone it shouldn't, give a false launch order. Anything.

You hit on the point yourself - a scheduled task. This could even be at hardware level, when the system clock hits a certain count and so on and so forth.

In a security sensitive place like a nuclear launch facility you need absolutely everything to be verifiable, everything.

Re:Security through obscurity

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah, but you can hide a microSD card anywhere. You could slip it into the last of your shoe by a tear at the very tip. Into a pen cap or inside a watch band. So if you can copy those 8" floppies onto a MicroSD, you can leave with them.

This takes forever, and it's a lot of work shuffling 8 inch floppies around. If the media were much more dense, you would have a much higher probability of success for copying the same amount of data, blocked off in chunks the size of the media. Gigabyte Jazz drives? You're dealing with one 400KB floppy or one 100,000KB floppy--you now may copy 250 times as much data with the same rate of success. Get it onto a MicroSD, conceal it, and leave. Copy it once, rather than 250 times.

Re:Security through obscurity

[CanHasDIY]

Doesn't matter, go back and read my original post - I merely pointed out that it's far easier to use modern tech to hack a modern system, then it is to scrounge up vintage tech for hacking vintage systems.

Re:Security through obscurity

[FreedomFirstThenPeac]

The Trajectory Division once suggested an acronym for a project that was called Reverse Azimuth Trajectories For Undetectable China Kills, those were the days.

Re:Security through obscurity

[lucien86]

Sounds like it might be EMP protected. A dead giveaway is that the power supply uses motor generators rather than standard transformers. Another is a heavy multi-layered case. I don't know how the connectors would work but they would might use tuned high frequency AC filters and maybe high voltages. The system I am working on (which needs an EMP/RFI shield) will avoid the problem by using fibre optic connections.

Re:Security through obscurity

[lucien86]

As long as the hardware mechanism is ok then the electronics should be pretty easy to repair or replace if something is broken. (a lot more easy with a service manual but still usually possible without) Those old drives were much simper than modern electronics, and generally from experience an awful lot tougher.

These old military machines/networks might be a different matter. In a service centre where I once worked, I once came across a strange circuit board in the scrap bin that looked like it had been deliberately designed to make it almost impossible to reverse engineer. It was probably mid 80's vintage, and had probably come off some old military scrap equipment or some kind of old mainframe.. The thing was heavily multi-layered and very densely packed (pre surface mount) and over 5mm thick and the wires ran in a grid pattern in what looked like a really complicated maze, plus the chips themselves were locked into tiny metal RFI canisters that made it very difficult to figure out what was going on - it looked like it had cost a fortune. Plus there was loads of tightly packed in track wiring tied on to the board like it had been half rebuilt at some point - something that would have been very expensive and time consuming to do.. I wish I had kept it.

All I am saying is that this board is exactly the kind of thing you would expect to find in a computer you would find in a secure missile control system, not easy to invade or infiltrate and probably totally custom everywhere.

Re:Security through obscurity

[DocMinde]

Take a look at the sourcecode for Linux Kernel 0.9 (First public version, IIRC) Then take a look at the sourcecode for the latest kernel, 3.something something I think y'all will find the mr. Xest is right about the codebase. All that said... I seem to remember reading somewhere (and forgive me for the fuzziness of my memory here, please) that... uhm... some of the nuclear power stations in the USofA were still using IBM's OS/2 because it was far better designed, even security wise, than Windows (at the time). And besides, there was this "security by obscurity" thing about it as well. So for the extra security which is built in to Unix systems (And Linux, *BSD, Darwin, and others that may be based on Unix) I would think it plausible that the USofA are utilising some form of Unix in their system. Perhaps heavily modified so as to not be recognisable as such (say, all commands and syntax being different, and the directory structure), but I could very easily imagine them doing something like that. If for no other reason, that would probably make them quite safe from 90% of todays "hackers." Just for the sake of asking a silly question (simply never heard the term before, figure that one out) doesn't "airgap" mean you need to physically access the computer somehow? As in, I wouldn't be able to sit "here" and access a computer "there", I have to be physically "there"? (Sorry for the silly question, I'm still in work mode, where "airgap" mean the empty space between product and the shelf above.... aka space that does nothing... I called it a "whitespace" once and I got hauled arsefirst into the office and told "not to use non-company terminology" for that.... )

Re:Security through obscurity

[Attila Dimedici]

However, there is nothing inherently special about a USB drive, vs. a floppy disk (+ drive):

Yeah, there is. A USB drive can be small enough to be hidden easily, say, inside a pen or some other innocuous device. Try doing that with an 8" floppy disk!
A device that only takes input from a keyboard or 8" floppy disks is much harder for a person to enter undesired software onto than one which can have such software loaded from a USB because someone attempting to load such software will be more obvious.
My comment had nothing to do with auto-run. It had to do with someone intentionally loading software. It is much harder to sneak onto the base with 8" floppy disks than it would be to do so with a USB drive.

Re:Security through obscurity

[bobthesungeek76036]

.... as my security clearance restricts me for like 75 years or something....

Uh, wrong. If it's a DoD security clearance it's like FOREVER

Sounds like we have a new phrase...

[jcochran]

Instead of "Security through obscurity", we now have "Security though obsolescence."

Re:Sounds like we have a new phrase...

[barlevg]

I wonder how many modern hackers would be able to make sense of, say, a PDP-7 if given physical access.

Re:Sounds like we have a new phrase...

[barlevg]

Erm, link fail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7

Re:Sounds like we have a new phrase...

[Registered Coward v2]

Instead of "Security through obscurity", we now have "Security though obsolescence."

Actually, obsolete is in the eye of the user. Sure, you wouldn't want that as a computer you use for watching videos; but if it reliably does its designed job than it is not obsolete. Old hardware has an advantage; it has been tested and debugged and known to work as planned. Replacing it would involve a lot of work for little gain if the old stuff works; and you run the risk of introducing new bugs and problems that could cause serious problems. A system designed today probably wouldn't rely on ancient hardware; however as long as you can keep it working replacing it is neither cost nor operably beneficial. Security is an added benefit.

Re:Sounds like we have a new phrase...

[rjune]

Is something obsolete if it can still perform it's design function effectively and economically? About 5 years ago, I gave a friend a Windows 98 computer as a backup for the one he had running an engraving machine. (For plaques that go on awards and trophies) The system is stand-alone and is designed for that type of computer. A replacement system would cost thousands and would not provide any additional benefit to his business. I wonder about the supportability issue, but otherwise I don't see a problem.

Re:Sounds like we have a new phrase...

[FatLittleMonkey]

However, the entire specs are available. There are probably physical examples in hardware museums to steal if anything isn't already documented. And you raise no eye-brows (well, prior to the theft) when asking old-timers about such systems.

Once mapped, you can simulate the whole thing on a trivial amount of modern hardware.

Old systems do not provide even security-through-obscurity since information is more likely to have leaked into the public domain. The silos are protected by a well-secured (and probably deeply paranoid) airgap. That's pretty much it.

Re:Sounds like we have a new phrase...

[Agares]

That is a pretty good point.

Re:Sounds like we have a new phrase...

[blackraven14250]

Having personally used one of those engraving systems, it could absolutely use a software update to something a bit more user friendly. There's a substantial learning curve that only exists because it's so counter intuitive (maybe not anymore, I worked at the jeweler a few years ago).

Not Internet Connected

[EmagGeek]

The silo wins the security battle through two things:

1) Physical security
2) Not being on the Internet

Yes, it's old stuff. Who cares? Nobody can touch it, and it's not on the global network. Not much else is required.

Re:Not Internet Connected

[Thanshin]

The silo wins the security battle through two things:

1) Physical security
2) Not being on the Internet

3) Armed guards with instructions to shoot on sight.

They are to security what rubber hoses are to cryptoanalysis.

Re:Not Internet Connected

[DougOtto]

3) Armed guards with instructions to shoot on sight.

As long as they're awake....

Re:Not Internet Connected

[Anonymous Coward]

Those silos are protected by the most dangerous weapon system in the US Military inventory: A bored 18 year old with an automatic weapon.

Re:Not Internet Connected

[Peter Simpson]

I think the scary thing is that somewhere, in a large warehouse, our government has a stock of 8-inch floppies. Either that, or they are buying them from Initech at ridiculously high, sole-source prices. Come to think of it, the latter case is probably more likely.

Re:Not Internet Connected

[hey!]

Actually, the idea of having an entire parallel infrastructure consisting of obsolete, unconnected machines is somewhat reassuring, even if the cost is somewhat exorbitant. After all, would you feel better if software upgrades, launch codes and targeting data were installed on the launch hardware with a Windows formatted USB flash drive?

Are there any old drives around that read these?

[bejiitas_wrath]

Are there any old drives around that can read these disks? What do they do if the drives fail? I am surprised this really still works, but I guess the stuff works, so they have no real inclination to upgrade it anytime soon. What old operating system do you need to read 8" floppy disks? Would DOS 6.22 work or would you need something even older?

Penis jokes aside...

[barlevg]

I see no downside to this. There's no reason for our nuclear silos to be networked or to run modern hardware. If it works, don't fix it.

Related: anyone remember in the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake how they explained that the reason there was all that old tech (phones with cords, manual doors) aboard a starship made with technology hundreds of years superior to our own was that they designed it that way on purpose to prevent hacking? Kinda makes you wonder--if there's actually a cyber warfare component to the next major conflict, will the military tech that's developed afterwards end up resembling 1970s (or earlier) era hardware more so than the "futuristic" tech you see in most modern SF?

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[bruce_the_loon]

I suspect that would be the case. One good war where you lose because your computer controlled weapons system got zero-dayed and the enemy was launching your own missiles at you via TeamViewer while your mouse refused to respond and I suspect your replacement ships would require you to manually program the coordinates and launch the missile by pulling a piece of string from behind a blast screen.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[Cornwallis]

Exactly. When the Clinton "young uns" moved in to the White House after Bush One they made a big deal of the old phone system and low-tech offices.

They upgraded to new systems and guess what? The WH started leaking like a sieve because it became easy to do. There was a reason the Bush White house was low-tech.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[Andy Dodd]

It was interesting, that also in BSG they claimed that the fleet did have much newer starships - the Galactica was being decommissioned due to being obsolete.

All those other starships in the fleet perished quickly due to network infiltration by the Cylons. The only remaining operational hardware was the non-networked stuff.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[Minwee]

"If it works, don't fix it."

Close. The phrase is actually "If it works, then you can't get a multi-billion dollar contract from the government to fix it."

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[barlevg]

If it's lasted four decades (I assume they run tests periodically), what makes you think it's going to break any time soon? My line of reasoning here is something similar to one I've heard about airplanes: in many senses, if you're going to fly, you want to be flying in an old bird--assuming proper maintenance, anything that was going to go wrong in a aircraft would have gone wrong already, so if it's still flying after several decades, it's likely the safest thing in the world.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[smooth wombat]

anyone remember in the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake . . . designed it that way on purpose to prevent hacking?

I do and I grinned when I heard those lines. Like so many of us on here, I work in the IT field (mainly solving problems created by others), and want to continually smack people upside the head when I hear them talking about wanting to add devices at random to the network or all the things they do on their smart phones.

The amount of people, in IT especially, who think networking everything is the be all and end all is staggering simply because these people, do not think the process through to realize the HUGE security issues they are opening themselves up to. These are the same people who think pushing the envelope of technology is a good thing until it bites them in the ass and they come running to my area to fix what it is they broke.

In a way, I get a sense of schadenfreude when I hear about people who have their phones lost/stolen with all their information on it, or who install the latest and greatest piece of software and find themselves wide open to attack.

Like most things, there is a reason not being at the forefront of technology is a good thing. You let others make the mistake and get exploited so you know how to be safe. In the case of Galactica, not being networked and not having the latest and greatest was its strongest defense.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[JaredOfEuropa]

launch the missile by pulling a piece of string from behind a blast screen.

From the manual: "Antiship missile (with loud report). Light, and get away".

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[drinkypoo]

Kinda makes you wonder--if there's actually a cyber warfare component to the next major conflict, will the military tech that's developed afterwards end up resembling 1970s (or earlier) era hardware more so than the "futuristic" tech you see in most modern SF?

More likely it will simply result in hardening of electronics, proper shielding and so forth. Anyone who reverts to dumb machines will get owned by people with proper automation.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[bluefoxlucid]

Do you remember in Dune they made it illegal to make a computer which thinks in the way of a man? The prequel to Dune was called "The Matrix".

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[Albanach]

Correlation != Causation. You could just as easily say that he cured the budget deficit and created more jobs than any president in the previous hundred years because he had a better equipped office.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[barlevg]

Right. The idea was that the Cylons hadn't been heard from in 40+ years, and so protecting against them was no longer the primary purpose of the Colonial fleet (what was? Putting down rebellions? Fighting space pirates?). Thus, the benefits of features like networking and sliding doors would start to outweigh the perceived threat (or, more likely, the defense contractors building the ships wanted to make them shiny). There's a bit of this suggested in Baltar's first scene, where he's giving an interview advocating the elimination of bans regarding AI research.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[Savage-Rabbit]

I see no downside to this. There's no reason for our nuclear silos to be networked or to run modern hardware. If it works, don't fix it.

Related: anyone remember in the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake how they explained that the reason there was all that old tech (phones with cords, manual doors) aboard a starship made with technology hundreds of years superior to our own was that they designed it that way on purpose to prevent hacking? Kinda makes you wonder--if there's actually a cyber warfare component to the next major conflict, will the military tech that's developed afterwards end up resembling 1970s (or earlier) era hardware more so than the "futuristic" tech you see in most modern SF?

People keep hyping up drones as the way of the future but I can't help but wonder if that enthusiasm won't be dampened by the first large scale incident of drone formations being hijacked or brought down by hacking or shot down in droves after their command links have been jammed. One good thing about pilots, they are very hard to jam and pretty resistant to hacking. There is a persistent rumour that the RQ-170 (aka. "The Beast of Kandahar") was brought down by jamming its satellite and ground control signals combined with a GPS spoofing attack that fed the drone false GPS data causing it to land in Iran. This may not be true but the mere possibility of this happening on a large scale in the middle of some major future shooting war in an air force where the majority of aircraft are pilotless drones is enough to make one make shudder.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[MightyYar]

If you take all that old stuff apart, little of it looks very hard to manufacture. And that's if you need to... most can probably be reconditioned or simply acquired from spares. Injection molded plastic will certainly get brittle, but making new 70s-era injection molded parts is not rocket science... if you even need them to be injection molded plastic. Machinable or rapid prototyped materials probably would work just fine. Remember that they don't need consumer-level cost effectiveness here.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[FatLittleMonkey]

assuming proper maintenance

That's the issue with old planes. As they pass down through the airline food-chain, they tend to inherit owners who don't or can't pay for sufficient maintenance, and tend to "make do".

More generally, the perception of old things being better is that designers and engineers tended to have a more wildly variable margin of error. The bad side was that you had many lemons, flawed by design, the good side was that anything that survived its first years was going to be rock solid. As we got better at understanding the engineering, we could target the lifespan much better. Less lemons, but also less solid rocks. Nice predictable failure curves (usually U-shaped.)

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[sjbe]

If it's lasted four decades (I assume they run tests periodically), what makes you think it's going to break any time soon?

It's not that it's likely to break. The problem (potentially) is that you don't know when it might break and if it does it's not clear if it can be repaired.

if you're going to fly, you want to be flying in an old bird--assuming proper maintenance, anything that was going to go wrong in a aircraft would have gone wrong already, so if it's still flying after several decades, it's likely the safest thing in the world.

That logic is flawed in several ways.

First, just because something has lasted a long time is not sufficient by itself to prove that it is safe. There is a bell curve to any product and some will last longer than others. With a large enough sample it may be simply that you are riding in the lucky plane that hasn't had a problem yet. Longevity alone does not constitute evidence of safety alone, though it *may* be evidence of solid design and/or maintenance if such proof can be correlated with other data.

Second, if something has been flying a long time, it may not be at risk for some failure modes but age and use generally bring on new failure modes to consider. Metal fatigue accrues over time - sometimes long periods of time and it isn't always easy to catch. Age related maintenance can be addressed but the longer something flies the greater the chance that something in the maintenance will be overlooked. It's a roll of the dice each time and if something can go wrong, eventually it will with enough chances.

Third is that old planes necessarily lack some of the improvements in safety features found on newer planes. Modern cars are a LOT safer in a crash than cars from 40 years ago. Modern cars also have features like stability control to help avoid accidents in the first place. Airplanes are similar in that regard. The state of the art in technology has progressed.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[Ozymandias_KoK]

That's certainly a more interesting option than the actual prequels were.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[gregmac]

The perception of old things being better is also highly influenced by survivorship bias. In short: the crappy old things have already broken and been thrown away and forgotten about. All the old things around that we still see are the ones that survived.

Re:Penis jokes aside...

[stanley_husky]

yes, indeed, i'd risk to say that nowadays (except when very heavy calculus is required) 1970's tech works quite fine on the field nowadays.
in fact, the current mars rover runs quite fine on a couple rad-hard, PowerPC @ 110MHZ, and i guess that's as hostile as an environment can get. if i remember correctly, it gets far more harder with more modern processors.

It makes a lot of sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you could bridge the air gap nothing on the other side uses USB or runs a modern operating system. The slower a launch command is to be verified the easier it is to stop an accidental launch.

Plus you ensure nobody can use the launch computers for anything else, even if it is reportedly the most boring job in the world being on watch down in the missile silo.

Re:It makes a lot of sense

[khr]

Plus you ensure nobody can use the launch computers for anything else, even if it is reportedly the most boring job in the world being on watch down in the missile silo.

They can't play a nice game of chess on them? Only global thermo nuclear war?

this is reassuring

[Jodka]

quoth ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein

"Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world.""

Note that the guy in charge of all the nuclear missiles in the United States invokes a security-though-obscurity argument to justify obsolete systems.

Re:this is reassuring

[Richy_T]

More like security through not pandering to user ease-of-use.

Re:this is reassuring

[mlts]

Security is about forcing the blackhats to go through time and expense. STO usually doesn't work, but with using thirty year old technology, it would require an attacker to jump through a lot of hoops just to even procure a computer that can read an 8" floppy drive, the drive itself, and the exact media used (hard-sectored or soft-sectored). Even then, there are different ways to format the disk, be it CAV or CLV, one read/write head or two.

Of course, once a usable disk is obtained, it is a lot harder to get that past security than a USB flash drive.

Nothing is 100% secure, but there are not many hacking tools made these days that can physically compromise an old System/3, or machine of similar vintage. It would take old school mainframe experience, something that wouldn't be widespread knowledge.

Re:this is reassuring

[Anonymous Coward]

You really want the Lord High Executioner to use Windows 8?

Re:this is reassuring

[FlyingGuy]

to justify obsolete systems.

Wow, you just don't get it! Your remark implies that he is some sort of Luddite with the attitude of, "it worked for my grand pappy so it is good enough for me!"

What the man said is that they did a complete audit of the systems and given the requirements they determined that what they have is the most secure system they can come up with.

Your remark also implies that they should be all modern with a nice tomcat stack running php, python or god alone only knows what bit of Swiss cheese stack of cruft to control the very things that could quite easily turn this entire planet into a spinning ball of radioactive fire."

Re:this is reassuring

[CanHasDIY]

quoth ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein

"Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world.""

Note that the guy in charge of all the nuclear missiles in the United States invokes a security-though-obscurity argument to justify obsolete systems.

Well, he does have a point.

For starters, if there's no modern input method (i.e., network connection, USB ports), there's no way to hack the system with modern electronics, and I doubt you could successfully sneak an era-specific "portable" computer in unnoticed.

The other good reason I thought of* is the fact that old, analog electronics are more likely to survive the EMP from a nuclear blast than modern, solid-state stuff. To wit, if a well-placed air-burst nuke drops EM radiation across the continental US, my 2009 pickup will be effectively dead, but my 1967 Mustang, with it's points-type ignition and lack of electronics, will fire and run like always.

* of course, this only applies if the systems in use at the missile silos are analog.

Re:this is reassuring

[medv4380]

No, it's not security though obscurity, it's security though not being on the internet, not needing the internet, and not wanting the internet. The older tech prevents someone from even being able to hook it up to the internet even if they wanted to. The internet is one big security hole, and if you don't need it then anything that prevents you from having it is a plus for security.

Re:this is reassuring

[meustrus]

Running obsolete systems isn't quite on par with typical security through obscurity. It's not a matter of guessing the right URL to access elevated permissions. It's a matter of procuring 50-year old technology, which by the way nobody outside of the US ever actually got good at producing. How exactly would you go about hacking into a system not connected to any networks and controlled by 8" floppy disks? Especially since, in addition to the obscurity, there are armed guards everywhere?

It's also important to note that newer is not always better. Newer is most often more complex, and in computer security, complexity is the enemy. Add to that the much higher engineering standards of software more than 30 years old, and I'd say it isn't really just obscurity that makes an obsolete system more secure.

Re:this is reassuring

[kyrsjo]

About the EMP: Outside of movies, I suspect a car won't care, as it isn't connected to any long transmission lines which amplifies the "area" part of V=A*dB/dt.

Re:this is reassuring

[Zordak]

The other good reason I thought of* is the fact that old, analog electronics are more likely to survive the EMP from a nuclear blast than modern, solid-state stuff. To wit, if a well-placed air-burst nuke drops EM radiation across the continental US, my 2009 pickup will be effectively dead, but my 1967 Mustang, with it's points-type ignition and lack of electronics, will fire and run like always.

* of course, this only applies if the systems in use at the missile silos are analog.

Electronics used in missile and launch-critical systems are required to be radiation hardened. That's part of why they are so expensive. These are not basic, off-the-shelf transistors. They are subjected to rigorous radiation tests to verify that they can survive certain attack scenarios. They also have to conform to a specific long-term reliability profile, since they sit doing nothing for decades at a time. Parts selection and qualification is an entire separate branch of engineering for nuclear weapons. (The system designers draw a circuit, and then the parts guys tell them what parts they can put in there.) They are also heavily shielded. EMP survivability is not a matter of serendipity for these systems.

Re:this is reassuring

[mlts]

Why can't more companies and organizations grok this point? An Internet connection is not a must for every new revision of a toaster.

Re:this is reassuring

[Agares]

You make a very good point. Also people who deal with computer security should know that the newer and more user friendly something is the more likely that it will be that the system is more vulnerable.

Re:this is reassuring

[FatLittleMonkey]

it would require an attacker to jump through a lot of hoops just to even procure a computer that can read an 8" floppy drive, the drive itself, and the exact media used

When they want to read old wax cylinders, they don't look for a wax cylinder player. They rig up a laser from an old DVD drive, use a bit of software cleverness on a laptop, and read the wax-wobbles via a non-contact interface.

The domains on an 8" disk are, by modern standards, huge. You could not only read them, you could do the equivalent of forensic analysis of layers of previous writes, using the heads salvaged off of a modern HDD. Hand held widget, place over the exposed part of the disk, spin the disk once by hand, everything else is handled in software.

Likewise the idea that there are no "network ports", hence no way for modern systems to get access. This probably also that the whole system has no "network" security, bypass the security console and you have direct access to the entire launch system, because it never occurred to the creators that you could spoof the entire console. (The equivalent of the old Windows password you could bypass by hitting "cancel" on the "Try again: Yes/No/Cancel".) So if someone can smuggle something small past the, probably impressive secured, airgap, there is no second line of defence. Unplug the existing terminal, plug in a tiny portable bit of modern, hard-hacked kit, pwn the whole system.

You might argue that the techniques necessary are not routine hacker knowledge. But Stuxnet was not created by a script-kiddy. They had a deep understanding of the system they were trying to sabotage. This is a nuclear missile silo, you can reasonably assume a motivated attacker.

Re:this is reassuring

[CanHasDIY]

Interesting; more interesting is the amount of debate on the topic.

Here's a couple links that all show different opinions of the potential dangers:

http://jalopnik.com/5937778/ho... (good one, has link to an actual study)

http://www.straightdope.com/co... (OK source, no study links but dude seems to know his stuff)

http://www.godlikeproductions.... (buncha freakin' morons, but worth reading so you can laugh at them)

Re:this is reassuring

[acoustix]

Likewise the idea that there are no "network ports", hence no way for modern systems to get access. This probably also that the whole system has no "network" security, bypass the security console and you have direct access to the entire launch system, because it never occurred to the creators that you could spoof the entire console. (The equivalent of the old Windows password you could bypass by hitting "cancel" on the "Try again: Yes/No/Cancel".) So if someone can smuggle something small past the, probably impressive secured, airgap, there is no second line of defence. Unplug the existing terminal, plug in a tiny portable bit of modern, hard-hacked kit, pwn the whole system.

You might argue that the techniques necessary are not routine hacker knowledge. But Stuxnet was not created by a script-kiddy. They had a deep understanding of the system they were trying to sabotage. This is a nuclear missile silo, you can reasonably assume a motivated attacker.

The scenario you describe means that they would have had to bypass several layers of physical security and also remove/compromise the two people at the missile command consoles, which are probably also armed.

The chances of someone successfully pulling off a plan like this is so insignificant it would never happen, unless its in a movie.

Face it. The system is about as secure as it possibly could be.

Re:this is reassuring

[kyrsjo]

The first one is pretty good - and I think I've read the report they're quoting. If I remember correctly, the basic conclusion was that unless you're so close that you're anyway dead from blast effects and radiation, you're probably fine. Maybe the instrument cluster will be a bit wonky, but it will most likely run fine.

That being said, I remember working on a small marine diesel engine, pulling something like ~30 horsepowers. That machine was compeletely mechanical - the only electronics on it was the battery charging alternator, starter engine (but it was supplied with a detachable crank just-in-case), and some instrumentation and monitoring like RPM counter, oil pressure sensor, and temperature sensor - all of which it would run just fine without. And being a diesel, you could probably run it on almost anything that burned slowly enough for it not to detonate - as an example, I know people have ran similar engines on used & filtered frying oil, claiming the exhaust smelled like french fries :P In other word - an EMP blast would do exacly nothing to such machines. And it was quite easy getting a good understanding of how it worked.

Re:this is reassuring

[CanHasDIY]

Regarding diesel fuels, I've personally witnessed both used vegetable oil and kerosene* run through an old 1980's vintage diesel pickup, and they both do indeed work as fuels. I've even heard rumors that people have put gasoline in a diesel tank and driven around for half a day before realizing that the engine was running a little rough (but running nonetheless).

Of course, if anecdotal evidence isn't your thing, check out this clip from Mythbusters

*runs a little lean, thanks to a lack of sulphur

Re:this is reassuring

[kyrsjo]

Yeah, and jet fuel is apparently also commonly used at military airfields, but apparently not so good for the engine due to worse lubricating properties. About the sulpur, I thought most fuel has been quite low on sulphur since at least the 90s - something like 3-5 ppm being the normal grade at the pump. Maybe there are differences between EU and US fuels.

Cool clip by the way, but I've rarely seen Mythbusters do any real statistics or larger samples - I personally count them as very nice anecdotes :)

I'm a bit unsure if I would do that to my own car tough, which runs on dieselas it's of the newer, fuel-injected variety. Diesel cars are *extremely* common in France and Norway, as the fuel is cheaper and the milage is better + more low-end torque is smoother for when driving a manual, which most people do over here. As far as I've understood, you're fine as long as the fuel is warm, but once it gets cold, it turns to "butter" in the pipes, meaning you have to remember to switch to normal fuel a bit before shutdown to "flush" the pipes. And I know from experience that fuel injectors are pretty delicate things, with lots of tiny chambers where the "butter" could hide away :/ But meh, I can get ~800 km for 50€ => I won't bother doing it, even if it's cool :)

Re:this is reassuring

[CanHasDIY]

Cool clip by the way, but I've rarely seen Mythbusters do any real statistics or larger samples - I personally count them as very nice anecdotes :)

Yea, I hate using Mythbusters as a reference due to their decidedly un-scientific methods, but that clip is an exception to the rule (and super-neat).

I'm a bit unsure if I would do that to my own car tough, which runs on dieselas it's of the newer, fuel-injected variety.

Hence the reason we tested it on an old pickup, and not the wife's brand new TDI. She'd kill me if she fired it up one day and smelled french fries.

Re:this is reassuring

[johnrpenner]

but how would you load the java 6 v22 update for the toaster interface!?!? (groan)

Re:this is reassuring

[kyrsjo]

Yeah, agree - that clip is pretty neat :) Link to another project, which was where I heard of it first (google translated Norwegian -> English, translation seems to be reasonable):
http://translate.google.no/tra...

Hehe, I could imagine she wouldn't be to happy - especially taking into account the extra plumbing that usually goes with it + it probably won't work too well with the guarantee :P

Re:this is reassuring

[FatLittleMonkey]

The scenario you describe means that they would have had to bypass several layers of physical security and also remove/compromise the two people at the missile command consoles, which are probably also armed.

And that was the point I, and others, were trying to make. The only security was that it was airgapped and had obsessive, paranoid, over the top physical security. The age of the systems (the existence of 8" floppies for example) added nothing to the system security. Because it likely was never designed with any computer security beyond the console itself, bypassing the console could well bypasses the entire missile security system. For example, the two-man activation system, the activation codes, etc. If the security is in the console itself, being able to bypass the console may allow direct access to the missile controls.

In the '70s, that might have meant lugging your own mainframe onto the base, or something equally ridiculous. Today, it's the sort of thing you could hide in a watch.

It may be impossible because of physical security (and god knows I hope it is), but the age of the system adds nothing and may actually have created a false sense of security. A false faith in the system, which often leads to weaker security elsewhere.

Re:this is reassuring

[acoustix]

The only security was that it was airgapped and had obsessive, paranoid, over the top physical security. The age of the systems (the existence of 8" floppies for example) added nothing to the system security. Because it likely was never designed with any computer security beyond the console itself, bypassing the console could well bypasses the entire missile security system.

We have no proof or idea of the security within the system itself. Any talk of it is pure speculation. What we do know is that the code is constantly being reviewed and has been updated since it's first implementation.

It would be much easier for an enemy/terrorist to get their own nuclear bombs from another source.

Re:this is reassuring

[anyGould]

Well, he is getting advice from "cyber engineers", so you gotta consider the source.

In all seriousness - I get that we want to make a differentiation between this and electrical or civic engineering, but please pick something better than "cyber". Otherwise don't be surprised when everyone expects you to look like a Borg drone in a suit.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[wiggles]

IBM PC architecture never used the 8" FDD to my knowledge.

I seem to remember those 8" drives on old DEC equipment - VAX minicomps and the like.

wha?

[MickyTheIdiot]

"Cyber engineers"?

I'm sorry, but anyone that uses this phrase is highly suspect.

I don't think it affects the information in this case, but there is a reason we think that journalists are stupid when it come to tech.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[lowen]

Yes, there are. I have one, and a Catweasel controller that can read and write basically any format on it.

The 8 inch standard format is very similar to the 1.2MB 5.25 inch format. Actually, it's the other way around, as when IBM built the PC AT and the high-density drives for it they apparently intentionally made the formats nearly identical. They're so close that computers that use 8 inch diskettes can typically be modified to run with 1.2MB HD 5.25 drives and media with only a new controller to drive cable and new drive power supply (8 inch drives typically take either AC mains power to run the spindle or 24VDC, and 5.25 drives take 12VDC to run the spindle). See http://nemesis.lonestar.org/co... for some tech info on how to do this with one of the first multiuser 'personal' computers, the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 16 (and descendents the 16B and the 6000). Also see http://www.dbit.com/fdadap.htm... for the 'proper' adapter board.

8 inch diskettes are famously reliable with good quality media, and the bits aren't packed so densely that an EMP event will wipe them out, as long as they're in a faraday cage with sufficient attenuation and power handling capacity.

Current production high-density PC FDC's can easily handle the 8 inch drive with the proper adapter cable, but the number of supported formats is small. More flexible is the USB interfaced Kryoflux, and the PCI Catweasel MK3 and MK4 (the Kryoflux is currently in production and available for purchase; the Catweasels have been out of production for a while and are a bit difficult to obtain last I checked; I bought my MK4 from amigakit.com, but they appear to only have the Amiga-specific MK2's in stock.

Floppy drives?

[un4given]

My concern here is not cybersecurity, but data integrity. Not sure what's on those ancient floppy disks, but if it is mission critical, then that's a problem. The failure rates on those would be unacceptably high.

Re:Floppy drives?

[JDG1980]

That was my first thought, too. Decades-old floppy disks might well have developed bad sectors – they do have backups, don't they?

Re:Floppy drives?

[Attila Dimedici]

I am quite confident that they have a source of new disks. The technology may be ancient, but I doubt the actual disks are.

Re:Floppy drives?

[lowen]

Hmmm.....

I know this is opening things up for lots of bad jokes..... but, it really boils down to whether the cookie's lubricant is still effective at allowing the cookie to spin to the correct RPM, +/- the FDC's tolerance. And that is dependent upon the storage conditions (mostly humidity) and the media quality. Being in a military application, this media is likely the most expensive made, if not the highest quality.

Yes, the actual magnetic media is called a 'cookie.' And the word 'cookie' is a bit more difficult to twist into a bad pun.....

If the dry lube used in the oxide coating on the cookie has become ineffective, then there will be a rather distinct screeching sound as oxide (and your data) flakes away. There are techniques to overcome this with bad media; however, back when 8 inch media was common it was also far higher quality that the cheap 5.25 media of the 80's was, and those 5.25 diskettes are the ones that have given my data recovery attempts the most difficulty.

Re:Floppy drives?

[mr_mischief]

This is the US military. There's a very good chance they have a six acre warehouse full of eight inch floppy disks that's fully climate controlled and guarded by snipers and dogs.

Re:Floppy drives?

[fnj]

It wasn't necessarily that the quality was so high. The bit and track packing density was ridiculously low.

With the Shugart single sided drives you could always play the trick of manually pushing down on the read/write head when it was reading. That would get you past a lot of marginal data situations. Then you could just write out a new copy on fresh media.

Re:Floppy drives?

[schlachter]

Or laser firing robots. Now that would be ironic.

Re:Floppy drives?

[number17]

While that's great and all, you could have a gazillion men guard a chocolate cake in a climate controlled room, but that ain't going to stop it from spoiling over time.

Re:Floppy drives?

[mr_mischief]

It doesn't have to be the same cake as long as there's enough chocolate cake to get the job done. See the reply where someone very wisely noted that the supply of 8" floppy disks is probably not as old as you're assuming.

Re:Floppy drives?

[toddestan]

Hopefully they track that stuff better than they track their ammunition.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[RenderSeven]

I still have my CP/M computer, twin 8" floppies, 64k memory, 4 mhz z80 processor. Every two years or so I fire it up just for fun, and it runs just fine. Agreed it shouldnt, but it does. And Wordstar runs just about as fast as the latest Word 2013. Not that I'd want to go back to those days, but there is no doubt in my mind it will outlive any computer and server in my office.

TRS-80 Model II Used 8" Floppies

[Hugh Pickens DOT Com]

The TRS-80 Model II was the business version of the early Radio Shack computers.

We bought one in 1979 and used it for for five years until we bought one of the first Macs in 1984.

The Model II had a word processor, database, and spreadsheet program.

http://www.trs-80.com/wordpres...

Secure against Cylons

[chiefcrash]

"Galactica is a reminder of a time when we were so frightened by our enemies that we literally looked backward for protection"

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[OzPeter]

IBM PC architecture never used the 8" FDD to my knowledge.

I seem to remember those 8" drives on old DEC equipment - VAX minicomps and the like.

I worked on systems in the late 80's that used 8 inch floppies (Network 90 DCS - which I think ABB owns nowadays). These were installed in the Operator Interface Units (OIUs) for backups etc. In my case I was running a pseudo multi-tasking program written in TI-Basic that read and wrote data to the floppies by overlaying variables in the Basic address space with absolute sectors from the floppies.

Yes .. it was primitive, even for its time.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[lagomorpha2]

Doesn't magnetic storage start to degrade after 40 years?

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[Major Blud]

A lot of CP/M machines had them too. I have a TRS-80 Model 4p at home that has two built-in 8" drives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

let's play global thermonuclear war

[Joe_Dragon]

What side to you want.

1. USA
2. USRR
3. United Kingdom
4. France
5. China
6. India
7. Pakistan
8. North Korea
9. Israel

Re:let's play global thermonuclear war

[prefec2]

Option 8 is not a real one. They cannot shot anyone beside China, South Korea and most likely themselves. And option two is called Russia these days.

Re:let's play global thermonuclear war

[HBI]

Which was misspelled anyway, USSR was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I mean after getting all those statues torn down and otherwise being tossed on the ash heap of history, Lenin probably deserves to have his creation spelled correctly.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[FlyingGuy]

Do you really think that the United States military, very specifically, the part of it that can unleash a version of hell that you have trouble even imagining, does not have the budget to get those drives manufactured, one off or any other part of the system?

Cue the immaturity

[geekmux]

"...Stahl described the disk she was shown as "gigantic," and said she had never seen one that big."

And she realized only when the last syllable rolled off her tongue the double meaning of her words, punctuated by the shit-eating grin the General couldn't wipe off his face as he tried to explain that nuclear cowboys wrangling silos must swing big disks to be "secure"...

Re:Cue the immaturity

[Registered Coward v2]

"...Stahl described the disk she was shown as "gigantic," and said she had never seen one that big."

And she realized only when the last syllable rolled off her tongue the double meaning of her words, punctuated by the shit-eating grin the General couldn't wipe off his face as he tried to explain that nuclear cowboys wrangling silos must swing big disks to be "secure"...

Since many of them are females you have unintentionally added to the double entendre.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[FaxeTheCat]

Anything from the 70's and the early 80's will work.
Some VAX computers (11/780 series) used 8" floppy to read the boot loader. OSes like VAX/VMS, RSX-11, RT-11 will read/write them. I also suspect that any old IBM computer/OS will read them.

The main problem is that hardware was more proprietary in those days. You cannot just plug in any 8" drive.
File systems and formatting were different between OSes and vendors, so you need the OS that wrote it to be able to read it (or an emulator).

Needs an update badly

[istartedi]

This is way out of date. We need to put our missiles in The Cloud, and re-do the launch control UI so it looks pretty. Get on it right away, I expect nothing less than $10 billion spent for a non-working system. Boy though, the guy wearing the fedora will think it's the best thing in the world. It is good for him too. It'll pay off most of his student debt.

Re:Needs an update badly

[schlachter]

distributed resources for elastic missile demand. fire as many as you need, with out having the hassle of maintaining them at your own site.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[confused one]

Yes, drives are available used (see ebay). I'm sure there is a contractor somewhere making decent money maintaining these. These drives were "robust" and would be fairly easy to repair. If you really needed a new one, the tech is easy to replicate. I wouldn't be surprised if someone maintains a facility to supply these on an as-needed basis (at an appropriately elevated price, of course). DOS 6.22 might be too new. My DOS 3.3 Sourcebook says it supported some 8" disk formats (that paralleled 5.25" formats) but that most of the 8" formats were obsoleted with DOS 2.x. Last 8" disk I saw was I believe a 250kB capacity used on a DEC PDP in an industrial application in the late 1980's.

Now was it ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... a nice, old single-sided model, or one o' them newfangled double-sided ones?

Re:Now was it ...

[lowen]

While the photo in the article is a bit grainy, judging from the location of what appears to be the index hole they're double-sided.

Re:Now was it ...

[Rambo Tribble]

Oh, great, nuclear war triggered by a head crash!

Re:Now was it ...

[lowen]

Well, in my experience the good quality double-sided drives are more reliable as they age. The reason being is that a single-sided drive has a rather critical piece of felt as a pressure pad on the top surface, and those pads are notorious for the glue holding them to the head carriage drying out and causing them to fall off.

Double-sided drives, on the other hand, have an actual head on the top surface and those tend to stay put.

Re:Now was it ...

[Rambo Tribble]

Good to know. I guess all we have to worry about now is if they're using that untested double-density stuff.

Re:Now was it ...

[lowen]

By the time double-sided drives came out the FM-encoded IBM 3740 format had been pretty much superceded by the System/34 MFM format.

Re:Now was it ...

[Rambo Tribble]

So, you're saying to really be safe, everything should be stored on trusty mag-cards?

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[lowen]

I've got to see pics of that, as that would be one rare 4P (I have two in my office right now.....). The case after all only allowed two Tandon TM-50 single-sided 5.25 drives to fit.

Now, the Model II had a single internal full-height 8; the 12, the 16, the 16B, and the 6000 had two internal 'slimline' 8's.

And 8's were the most common for the various CP/M boxen. Side-by-side 8's fit quite nicely in a 19 inch rackmount chassis, such as several boxen by Altos.

Then there were the RX01 and RX02 drives for PDP 11's.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Yep, had old CP/M based Cromeco systems that had the 8" floppies. For a long time I had a copy of DBase II on 8" floppies to run on that Cromeco system. Lost it in an Air Force move.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[drinkypoo]

IBM PC architecture never used the 8" FDD to my knowledge.

You are correct. The IBM PC-1 shipped with either one or two 5.25" 360k full-height floppy drives. It had a ~60W power supply, so if you wanted an internal HDD you had to upgrade it. The original BIOS didn't support HDDs anyway. My first PC was a PC-1 (past its prime) with an external Quantum 30MB full-height MFM disk. ST-506 cables wrapped in copper wrapped in rubber and clamped hard into the expansion slot opening, mainframe style. Those were the days. Which days? The days when even personal computer hardware was built for keeps. Then the PCjr came along and proved that an IBM PC compatible could be a cheap POS and the rest is history.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[L4t3r4lu5]

I have a TRS-80 Model 4p at home that has two built-in 8" drives.

This guy is one of the greatest threats to the US Minuteman missile system.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[eclectro]

The military probably have a warehouse dedicated to this system with a thousands of new drives in the box. When one goes bad (but being mil spec'd they probably won't) they would just swap out the bad one.

Also, the old eight inch drives were built like tanks to begin with.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[Nethead]

Got an 8" Turbo Pascal disk hanging on the wall of my office.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[rjune]

I have a couple of those drives and they supported the IBM 3270 format. They are Heathkit drives and this was in the documentation.

There's an app for that

[RogueWarrior65]

The sad yet interesting thing about this is that the entire system could probably run on a single smartphone. Which reminds me, anyone know what the rocket launcher app on the Apple "Gigantic" commercial is? Hint: It's not called "Rocketlauncher"

Re:Err.. nope

[thedonger]

I still have somewhere the code of the ancient Disk Killer virus. Back in the day, it destroyed disks and drives by lowering the head and killed a floppy drive in a matter of seconds, and if not removed quickly destroyed the drive as well. Destroyed as in "irrecoverable damage, dump in the nearest trash bin". If they are still using 8'' drives, chances are those are still vulnerable to the hardware hacks that made the hardware misbehave this way.

To think that a single boring fellow can potentially destroy the launching codes and render the US without nukes is scary as hell.

Captcha: predict

A "single boring fellow" could potentially render the US without the nuke in his silo, but then he could do that anyway regardless of the hardware. That's why they don't advertise this position on Craig's List. I would be much more concerned about the nuke silos relying on new hardware designed to be outdated in 3 years.

Re:Err.. nope

[kyrsjo]

You mean Ogre? I don't think that can actually physically destroy a plate:
http://wiw.org/~meta/vsum/view...
If you mean something else, I would be interested in hearing how it actually manages to change the head flying altitude...

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[VAXcat]

DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) sold lots of systems that used these 8" disks. Lots of PDP-8 systems and PDP-11 systems used them for system devices. DEC's first VAX computers, the 11/780, used them as load devices for loading the microcode before the system would boot from a real hard disk. I have a bunch of them in my collection, attached to PDP-11s, still working fine.

Just use an incompatible connector

[sjbe]

You have to admit, the old hardware makes it hard for some random officer to violate the air gap by plugging in his USB-using cellphone.

A problem easily solved by using a proprietary/non-standard connector. You can use USB without using a standard connector. Electrically it doesn't matter at all.

Re:Just use an incompatible connector

[ImprovOmega]

I will be extraordinarily impressed if you can get your Galaxy S5 to communicate with an 8" floppy drive (or the computer using it), even assuming you have some hypothetical proprietary/non-standard connector to make the physical connection with.

Re:Just use an incompatible connector

[sjbe]

I will be extraordinarily impressed if you can get your Galaxy S5 to communicate with an 8" floppy drive (or the computer using it), even assuming you have some hypothetical proprietary/non-standard connector to make the physical connection with.

Why would you want to do that? I was addressing the problem of standard USB products making it too easy to bridge the air gap. Replace the 8" floppy completely with a USB product (or similar) with a non-standard connector. Then you don't have the problem of memory sticks or phones plugging in easily.

Re:Just use an incompatible connector

[HornWumpus]

Anybody ever use a USB to RS232 dongle on android? That's about all it would take.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[I'm New Around Here]

We used then in the computers in the 90s. Old military supplies and maintenance system. Once the systems got replaced with more modern equipment, the old stuff was probably sold off to the companies that keep this stuff for these situations.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[jfdavis668]

They are not reading data from long ago. They are storing current data on old technology.

Reality

[DerekLyons]

Related: anyone remember in the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake how they explained that the reason there was all that old tech (phones with cords, manual doors) aboard a starship made with technology hundreds of years superior to our own was that they designed it that way on purpose to prevent hacking?

You find it surprising to find that a fictional world is built to accommodate the plot set in it? Seriously, fiction is a very, very, bad way to evaluate things for the real world.
 

I see no downside to this. There's no reason for our nuclear silos to be networked or to run modern hardware. If it works, don't fix it.

Disclaimer: While I don't play a nuclear weapons technician on TV, I was one in real life. (Fire Control Technician (Ballistic Missiles) Second Class (Submarines), USN Submarine Service 1981-1991.) I've worked with weapons system components (both installed and spare) that were years and decades old, and have studied the issues as a civilian as well.
 
Actually, there's a number of downsides, most of which should be obvious with a few minutes serious thought:

• Spares - as your systems recede ever further from current technology, the cost of spares goes up and the number of potential suppliers goes down. One of things that drove the (many times delayed) conversion of the SSBN's from Trident-I to Trident-II in the late 90's/early 00's was the drying up of the spares pool. (One of the key reasons they were able to delay so long was they were able to rely on a pool of spare salvaged from the older '41 boats when they were decommissioned in the early 90's.)
• Maintenance - as components age (and they do age, whether installed or sitting in a warehouse), you start climbing up the right hand side of the bathtub curve. This means that your maintenance costs and downtime start rising sharply and also exacerbate the spares issues. I've personally had to replace cables where the insulation was damaged by aging - and had to go through three sets of spare cables to make up one good one. (And the trainers really kill you here, as they're used and abused much harder than the operational hardware.)
• Support - as with spares, the farther you recede from current technology and practices, the harder it becomes to find people and companies with the experience to support and maintain the systems. Eventually you reach a closed ecosystem where the military relies on local tribal knowledge and contractors rely on a pool of specialists that dwindles as the old guys retire. (You can overcome this, but it costs significant money.)
• Compatibility - when you (as the USAF has done) upgrade parts of the system but not the rest, you end up with all manner of compatibility issues. You either have to limit the performance of the new hardware, or build specialized interfaces, or build in emulators, etc... (The latter two drive up costs and increase the potential sources for faults and bugs.)

Etc..., etc...
 
The USAF claiming that older tech makes them more 'safe' is just making lemons into lemonade. (And the situation is mostly a product of how far the missiles are from being a priority.) Mostly, I evaluate the claims as a way to deflect attention from the number of serious incidents they've had recently and from their significant personnel problems.

Re:Reality

[blackfeltfedora]

I have gotten to experience the transition from legacy to modern computer systems on submarines first hand. Yes new equipment adds all kinds of cool functionality but it breaks a lot more often and the fix usually takes longer than replacing a single card or power supply.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[FlyingGuy]

You damn fucking right when it comes to maintaining absolute control over things that can vaporize the planet. Until they are gone, we spend whatever it takes.

On eBay?

[sjbe]

Brand new in box on ebay for $195

You really want to trust national security to stuff we find on ebay?

Re:On eBay?

[cusco]

That's where the Pentagon was buying parts for their herds of Vaxen in the late-'90s/early-'00s. I think the DECs are all gone now. they shredded most of them because the fucking brain surgeons that become generals thought there could be secret data somehow stored in memory and dumb terminals.

SACDIN?

[4wdloop]

What's the pronunciation?

"Sucked in" ?

I'm sure it's using ADA

[docwatson223]

Combine ADA, Floppy Disks, and Mainframes with the usual SCI 'air gap' and that sucker isn't going to be breached anytime soon.

Re:I'm sure it's using ADA

[mlts]

Ada 2012, or an earlier rev? Programming languages do help, but are not a guarantee of security. I'm sure one can write a bad website or application in Ada as they can in Java, PHP, Python, or HTML5.

Re:I'm sure it's using ADA

[docwatson223]

I'm thinking a MUCH earlier and incompatible version of ADA.

ppt Topo?

[DarwinSurvivor]

Someone please tell me I'm reading that wrong. The fas.org website has a network map labeled "Topographic" with a link to a .ppt file containing nothing but a larger copy of the same image. Did this guy write their website?!?

Not as Safe as You Think

[NicknamesAreStupid]

The last machine that I recall using 8" disks was an NEC PC 8086. Running DOS 2.1, it was shaped like a microwave oven. That was in the mid 1980s. The diskette held about a megabyte, and there was no HDD.

The DDN network is likely an X25 WAN with bisync lines (RS422 or V35), a.k.a. ARPAnet. Bisync was notorious for going down due to 2-bit errors, making data look like control characters. I had a script that could reset a line, and you couldn't tell if the signal had gone down. That meant it was possible to tap into it. Diskettes could carry malware, and as several have mentioned, machines that booted from them were victims of some of the first PC viruses. Theirs probably boot from socketed EPROMs, which are easy to swap. All this was architected before network security was an issue. Fortunately, most terrorists are too young to know about these antiquities. However, if the Air Force believes it is invulnerable because it is ancient, then we are doomed.

Why waste money?

[sjbe]

Do you really think that the United States military, very specifically, the part of it that can unleash a version of hell that you have trouble even imagining, does not have the budget to get those drives manufactured, one off or any other part of the system?

Just because they theoretically can doesn't make it a good idea. Are you seriously going to claim that this is the only means by which to secure these systems? That nothing else more modern could possibly do the job with equal or better security? Color me dubious.

I'm fine with ain't-broke-don't-fix-it but if the choice is between building a stupidly expensive small run of some obsolete tech or swapping the old tech out for new, I'd vote for the later every time unless there is a very specific technical reason not to do so.

Slow bureaucracies

[sjbe]

There was a reason the Bush White house was low-tech.

Security was not the primary reason - that was at best a second order effect. Mostly it was bureaucratic inertia, particularly on the part of the old-farts that tend to inhabit positions of power. People are slow to change, particularly older people.

The owners of the company I run are both in their 70s and they have the sort of computer skills you might expect for someone that age - i.e. poor. They're not opposed to new tech but they've been doing things a certain way for a long time and have a hard time even understanding the potential of new tech sometimes, much less operate it. They prefer a paper catalog to an online one, even when the online one is faster once you learn it.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[fnj]

Are you trying to say Cromemco?

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[fnj]

There are quite a few 8" floppy drives that old-timers have kept around. I've got like 3-4 dual floppy cabinets (they weigh over 20 pounds), but they've been stored at 95% humidity in the cellar for at least 30 years and would probably require some internal cleaning and spiffing up to work again. The seek mechanism is a stepping motor with a big honking aluminum screw which will last longer than western civilization. The read/write heads are gigantic and built like a tank; you can clean them with cotton swabs and alcohol.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[NJRoadfan]

I guess the TRS-80 Model II + fully populated expansion chassis I had (4x 8" drives!) would have been a nice source of spare parts.

LOL

[Zynder]

ZING!

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[NixieBunny]

I seem to recall from my BIOS writing days with CP/M, that the 8" drives had twice the data rate of the 5" drives. They also spun faster, 360 RPM vs 300 RPM. The 8" IBM format was soft sectored 26 sectors of 128 bytes, and the 5" used 16 sectors of 128 bytes or something like that. too many numbers to remember.

At any rate, the four 8" floppies that I still have in my meager collection are all different, for different CPUs, OSes, languages, different sector formats, etc. The closest I came to inter-system compatibility was to write a CP/M floppy reading program for the PDP-11.

Forget Security how about reliability!

[madhi19205]

While nobody want to see those missiles fly they have to be able to. Am not so sure that if the order came they won't realize that 95% of them are all just junk. It like when the old Soviet Union fell and everybody realized that all their scary hardware was junk.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[RevWaldo]

The IMSAI 8080 had 8" drives
http://www.computerhistory.org...

"Secure system" - yeah, right....
http://www.imsai.net/images/wa...

.

security through time

[schlachter]

You don't have the schematics and architecture for this system floating around on servers at some DoD defense contractor. You don't have 1,000 people floating around who have intimate knowledge of the system and how it was designed. You're not leveraging packages/code/compilers/etc that have a support community around them. The lack of people who know about how this system works is key.

Top Secret

[Plum]

You guys are funny.

As if he showed you something that meant anything.

The system is classified. You saw nothing. Nothing except what they decided they would show you for the purposes of making a TV show.

Does anyone one know the lifespan of these disks

[[000000]]

Does anyone one know the lifespan of these disks and the readers.

Here's the location of every silo....

[Shakrai]

No common knowledge of location

Fail. Took two seconds with Google to find a site listing the GPS coordinates of every single Minuteman silo. It's a fascinating read for any defense geeks, I've stumbled across it before.

Big magnet

[phorm]

Heck, if they're stored on floppies, put some big honking magnets near the exits and they'll likely not survive the trip out.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[drinkypoo]

You sound like a colossal faggot.

Sorry to disappoint you.

These Republican lies are getting out of hand.

[greenwow]

It’s just a damn floppy. Trying to lie and claim it is out of date so you can justify stealing more money from the American people is disgusting. Shugart didn’t even release an 8” floppy until 1973. She was born in 1941 so she has been caught in a lie. All of her kind are liars. She, like everything and everyone name Shugart, is a piece of shit. The Shugart family has stolen more than a hundred million dollars from us for their garbage 8” drives. These Republicans are thieves and liars.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Watch list if purchased?

[suso]

I'm curious if at this point buying an 8" floppy disk (or any other significantly old technology that only nuclear missle silos use) would get you put on some terrorist watch list.

The only battlestar to survive the cylon attack...

[rbrander]

...they maybe even have 1940's phones as intercoms, just like the Galactica.

Re:never heard of floppy disk before

[suso]

Those 8" floppys could only store 242KB of data. The 5.25" ones could only store 160KB per side depending on the drive format and before they started having high density floppy disks, which wasn't until the late 80s.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[lowen]

I seem to recall from my BIOS writing days with CP/M, that the 8" drives had twice the data rate of the 5" drives. They also spun faster, 360 RPM vs 300 RPM. The 8" IBM format was soft sectored 26 sectors of 128 bytes, and the 5" used 16 sectors of 128 bytes or something like that. too many numbers to remember.

Right, for the 360K double-density 5.25.

Like the 8 inch System/34 format, the 5.25 high-density drive in the PC AT also ran at 360 RPM instead of 300, and had double the data rate of the double-density 5.25 inch drives, yielding exactly the same number of sectors per track, with the only difference being that the 8 inch has 77 tracks and the 5.25 HD drive has 80.

Security by Obscurity

[scruffy]

Treating it as a maxim rather than as a caution.

TEMPEST is as TEMPEST does

[WillAffleckUW]

Most of the TEMPEST computers we programmed in the military for SECRET and above back then used 8 inch CP/M floppies.

Our slowest peripherals were the line printers attached.

If it ain't broke don't (*KABOOM!!!*) "fix" it.

I have an idea

[slashmydots]

This is sort of like ATMs but eve more so. They do one thing. Just make a device that does one thing without really an OS. Why the hell are ATMs running XP? So why aren't missile control and security and launch controls just gauges, switches, cameras, sensors, and buttons? You need a missile guidance computer and communication encryption to the missile but a lot of the simpler systems can be electrical circuits or ultra simple chips about the same grade as an LED glowstick uses to flash its lights. If you want to know the temperature of a missile storage facility, transmit it through a digital thermometer to a few LED displays after hitting an interpretation chip. If you want to turn up the temperature, use a rheostat or equally simple digital point to point system. Why the hell does it have to be a full blown computer to do something so stupid? That makes even a floppy disk system look overcomplicated and needless.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[maestroX]

ahhh, ye olde Tandon drives where double density floppies could be used as high (1.2M) density.

Isuspect IRS uses "Security through Antiquity"

[peter303]

Lots of COBOL and 9-track tapes. they havent had one these Target-size breaches yet.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[Cramer]

The model 4 and 4P had 5.25 drives. Everything from the model 3 on had 5.25 drives.

Old, but functional

[nehumanuscrede]

Some of the data storage units we had would put the 8" floppy to shame.

They were called DTD's and were the size of a medium Igloo cooler. Kinda cool in that the case was see through and you could watch the platter mechanism and read / write heads do their thing while it was operating. They weighed ~40 pounds or so and were hot-swappable. They were kept in two person control safes ( yes, two combos, no one ever had both combos ) and were loaded into the system as needed depending on mission and where in the world we were at the time.

To transport them, they were placed into a larger DOD approved case ( like a big Pelican case, just DOD approved ) locked, then sealed in with tamper seals. Big enough to require two persons to carry which was convenient since they were two-person control items.

Unlikely it is still the same today, but this was only back as far as the mid-90's.

New tech is great, but you can't toss one of those things in your bag, throw it over your shoulder and walk off with it :D

those systems are SO OLD...

[swschrad]

that to mount a "man in the middle" attack, you need a horse and a lance.

Re:those systems are SO OLD...

[RockDoctor]

A lance with a point on each end.

Of all the random things I've lost...

[John Pfeiffer]

I used to have an unopened box of Memorex 8-inch floppy disks, still shrink-wrapped and everything, but I lost it in a move. :( We had a typesetter, and it took the 8-inch floppies. I'm the kind of unabashed nerd who revels in possessing those kinds of 'artifacts'.

Floppies don't last for ever

[Cacadril]

I don't know the 8", but all my old 3.5" failed when I tried to read them a few years later. I don't think it was the drives, the disks began failing one by one, and I had multiple drives that gave fairly consistent results. I hope they remember to make copies of the floppies every year or so.

Stupid Civilians!

[NicBenjamin]

Stop thinking like a goddamn civilian, civilian.

This is the fucking air force. These people burn $100k jet fuel on an hour of flight time just to say they went Mach 2, bill Congress, and get fucking reimbursed. The fact that your pissant little bitch-group could not get replacement parts for an 8-in floppy has no relevance to determining whether these assholes can. They simply wrote into the contract "And you floppy-supplying bitches will supply spares for $X," back in 1967. Then they put $X in the budget. It's still in the budget, with a little bump for inflation. If they need their fucking spare parts and Floppy-Supplying-Bitches-Inc cannot deliver somebody's going to Federal fucking prison for defrauding the Federal fucking Government, and some other guy is gonna get rich with a short-order contract.

And let's look at your proposal:
You're proposing the Air Force rip up that contract from 1967, replace with a new (and much more expensive contract). But the contract will still involve interfacing modern computers with 1960s tech because the whole fucking point of this missile silo is to tell a 1966-designed missile fucking commie city to level. You don't do that with USB. You don't want to upgrade the missile itself because if you do that you're making your missiles better, which means the Russians will think "Why the fuck would they make their missiles better if they didn't want to vaporize my sister?" In the Biz, we call that a bad thing. This also applies to many of the systems that relate to the missile, because if we are spending 2 million modernizing each silo, that's $900 million, and nobody except you is gonna believe we're spending $900 million on nuclear missiles and not improving the damn things.

So you're still gonna need some version of Floppy-Supplying-Bitches-Inc., you're gonna risk pissing off the Russians (and it's not like they're in a pacifist mood), and given that it's a government IT project odds are it doesn;t work at all until at least version 2.

Re:Err.. nope

[HornWumpus]

There was an often repeated story about a drive company claiming their drive was indestructible. So a CalTechy programmed the computer to move the heads at the platter resonance frequency...

Not sure if it's true, but it sounds good.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[dublin]

8" floppies were used by almost all serious micro- and mini-computers of the pre-PC era, so operating systems were all over the map - I've personally used 8" floppies on CP/M machines, various PDPs and VAXes (the former usually running RSX-11 and the latter running VMS, of course), the IBM Series/1 minicomputer, the TI 990, and the staggeringly powerful 68000-based 2D/3D CAD system running Unix Version 7 and later, BSD.

BTW, some of the older ones required "hard-sectored" floppies that had (10, IIRC) small holes punched around the inner side of the disk to assist in synchronization. The NorthStar CP/M machines were famous for that - I have a box of them in the garage with a *very* basic BASIC CAD program, but wouldn't have the foggiest idea where to get anything to read them, a fate that is soon to befall my QIC24 tapes, Zip disks, and both 5.25" and 3.5" Mac, PC, and Unix floppies, including some from the weird and wonderful (if doggy-slow) Intel-powered Sun 386i.

Hey, at least I still have players for vinyl and 8-track...

What about the others?

[manu0601]

While I am satisfied US did not merge its ICBM control network with the Internet of Things, I hope the other nuclear powers did the same.

Well I'll be

[terrywirth5]

damned. The guy has got a point. Security via obsolescence and still using typewriters with fabric ribbons I suppose. Nevertheless, the whole shtick makes perfect sense.

Antique Value?

[sir-gold]

I have 1 unopened (still shrinkwrapped) box of 10 8 inch floppies, 1 opened box (9 left I think), and a cleaning kit. They are all the same brand and, as far as I can tell, intended for the Amstrad CPC (they say CPC word processor on the box)

Are they worth anything?

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[drinkypoo]

What, you are a small one?

Oh no, I'm not a small anything. I just don't swing your way.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[Stuarticus]

I've got a Terak 8510 in my office that appeared from an old language project, pretty cool machine doesn't seem to boot and I don't have time to diagnose it unfortunately. Runs UNIX 6 apparently.

Those disk are for field

[Dante1321]

8" disks are perfect for backing up field... so were 5.25' as well as !SCSI! The fact that you don't know this means we threw GODI away. And godi laughed in true neutral bias

Funny thing about 8' floppies...

[DrStoooopid]

...those probably cost 1,000 each when they were new...and probably cost 1,000 each to replace them because they're now a specialty item.

Re:Funny thing about 8' floppies...

[DrStoooopid]

I also have to wonder.....if this is the plan of the anti-nuke crowd, just don't approve funds for upgrades so that when the storage media *does* fail (and it will) and nobody makes replacements, this will effectively render our nuclear arsenal useless and inert. (If I were "lil' Kim" and Putin I'd be buying up floppy manufacturers)

Security by obscurity

[nessman]

Security by obscurity. Good luck finding a PC with an 8" floppy drive that still works these days.

A couple of years ago I came across an 8" floppy drive and 8" head cleaning floppies that were still sealed and moist with cleaner fluid in the basement storage of a large gas/electric utility I was doing work at. Hadn't seen those since the TRS-80 Model II days.

Re:Are there any old drives around that read these

[bobthesungeek76036]

My first computer was an Apple ][ with two 8" floppies and a Z80 CP/M co-processor. The computer never booted AppleDOS (or whatever it was called) while I owned it. It was 100% CP/M.