fuzzing, back-doors, or rootkits - and to develop new, more intricate ways to steal a machine’s mind. This race for mastery is a sprint, one that heads ever deeper into the depths of a vulnerable system. The closer you are to the very core of a computer program or a network, the more control you have. Real mastery of the heart of a system would be like having a spy win the Presidency, turning the whole US government into a “Weird Machine”. That prize of immediate, high-level and totally “trusted” access remains the Warez Dude gold standard. 18
The most dangerous - and therefore the most alluringly valuable — of these sorts of attacks, are known as “zero-day” exploits. The danger they represent only becomes apparent at some awful instant, “Day Zero”, when they are revealed to have been running wild inside some hapless network or machine. That first moment in the knowledge of the bug is like day zero in a cancer diagnosis, and it begins an immediate race to find and deliver a cure. Such completely unknown, secret vulnerabilities are fissures in the walls of computers that their manufacturers, system engineers, and security experts usually don’t realize are there. The dream of hackers and spies and greedy Warez Dudes is a version of this trick called an “Advanced Persistent Threat” - hidden, back-door access to a machine that endures even for years, through upgrades and security checks and system cleanups, all the while forcing the now-weird computer to do things its user won’t even be aware of: Send a copy of every keystroke to another machine, for instance, or serve as a robotic launching pad for attacks on other machines. All while acting like a perfectly normal machine.
The best of the zero day exploits are based not on the idea of sneaking malicious software onto machines so much as on taking existing, trusted code and finding tiny holes that can be blasted into giant, insecure data tunnels. These tools for manipulation are digital opiates, in a sense, for connected nervous systems. Such attacks often rely on errors already knit into computer systems, or innocent seeming features that can be made dangerous. Every computer and software designer knows their systems are vulnerable. Mathematicians have proven you can never be absolutely sure a connected machine is safe. A mobile phone, for instance, contains nearly 30 million lines of code. The systems that run massive cloud computing basins like those at Google or Amazon are even larger, updated every day, and have to cope with unprecedented flows of data at very high speeds. Even expert programmers will leave four or five errors in every million lines of code.139
138 That prize: Sergey Bratus, Julian Bangert, Alexandar Gabrovsky, Anna Shubina, Daniel Bilar, and Michael E. Locasto, “Composition Patterns of Hacking”, Proceedings of Cyberpatterns (2012)
139 Even expert progammers: For a good explanation of how a machine’s code can be turned against itself, see Sergey Bratus, Michael E. Locasto, Meredith |. Patterson, Len Sassaman, and Anna Shubina, “Exploit Programming: From Buffer Overflows to ‘Weird Machines’ and Theory of Computation.” ;login December 2011, p. 13-21. The piece is co-authored by and in honor of Len Sassman, one of the leading thinkers of the Language Security or LangSec movement who died in 2011. Many of his talks, still available online, reflect an unusually powerful mix of philosophical and
100
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018332