Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were the PM of Israel, would you stake the lives of 6m people on that? It would be Iran's end, but it would be too late for Israel if it came to that.
Every nation has to trust the country with nukes that they won't invade or destroy them. If you were Iran, would you trust the US not to try to invade or topple your country? Iran isn't alone with the rhetoric of 'destroy your enemies'. North Korea and the US sell the same story, just the enemy changes. Whether the enemy is Israel, the US, or the arbitrary definition of a terrorist, the sell is ultimately a strategy…
The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written
491–500 of 507 posts
Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most people perceive complexity as things they don't understand. I don't think this is true. For example, as a math teacher, I couldn't do a very good job predicting how easy or difficult students would find particular problems. But I could easily predict which problems would be easier and which would be more difficult. I could do that even though I personally understood all the problems.
I don't think difficulty is complexity. For example, the bitcoin mining protocol complexity is the same but the difficulty goes up or down. I'll attribute difficulty to the energy required to resolve a system. For example, pulling weight. The complexity of the action is the same. But the difficulty depends on the weights to pull.
Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written
#493Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written
#494I would argue that this one was more sophisticated: http://pferrie.tripod.com/papers/zmist.pdf What I am seeing lately with malware is increasing decline in sophistication, today malware is lame compared to the malware created around 2000. I would think that level of low level knowledge is rapidly dropping. When there were still real file infectors, there were some serious nasty technologies involved (btw, todays ran…
Other than permuting itself, what did it do that was sophisticated? Code morphing viruses have been around for a very long time, much longer than 2000. Simple replication does not constitute sophistication. Even my brother in law does that.
Sometimes how you do it is far more interesting than what you do (but it might be a tad more complex to understand).
Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written
#495Stuxnet changed history. Any "game of chicken" style equilibria is broken if the probability a nuclear actor's command and control drops below 100%. If there is even a 1% chance that when a Big Red Button is pushed the missiles fail to launch the game becomes unwinnable. Simulations of imperfect information in dynamic brinkmanship where both players are known to have advanced cyber capabilities results in a single dr…
After the first couple of sentences I came to the opposite conclusion: perhaps the greatest nuclear powers have all had their launch systems compromised already, and if people started pushing buttons nothing would happen. Comforting thought.
a) at least two of these secret security teams exist, funded by different political superpowers
b) the one team behind this worm was funded by a group insisting on global denuclearization.
Imagine if what you say is true for every nuclear power, except one (likely the one that is behind this worm).
Have we heard of any other enrichment facilities that have been targeted? There are still a ton out there[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium#Global_enrich...
Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not scared of what “we” are doing to “them”, but rather what “they” are doing to “us”... our power plants, dams, electrical grids, gas pipelines, traffic light networks, air traffic control systems.........
The above comment makes no mentions of who is doing what to whom. I think the idea of “us” doing things worse than I could imagine is just as scary as the other way round. You are indirectly part of the responsible bodies and may face the backlash without having been able to not only do but even know anything about it. Imagine for exemple being a Russian citizen whose quality of life is diminished due to political/ec…
I know quite a few Russians. Almost all act defensive over how people treat Russia as a politically homogeneous (evil) unit, when it's mainly a few oligarchs at the top. To the point of defending the political explanations espoused by state TV, which of course is heavily biased towards the narrative said oligarchs want the Russian people to believe.
Remind you of anything? I for one have stopped trusting Dutch news for "being honest with itself".
Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my view, the sophistication is implied by the breadth of expertise required to put the whole thing together. Google Search and the OS landscape are for sure broad and sophisticated. However, their development was accomplished by computer scientists. In order for stuxnet to be effective, it was necessary to employ expertise in: - Uranium enrichment methods and processes - Capital equipment control systems and their…
But do those things really contribute to the sophistication of the software? For example imagine some code written with no understanding of uranium enrichment: const int CENTRIFUGE_RPM = 500; And then some other code written with a deep understanding of uranium enrichment: const int CENTRIFUGE_RPM = 1203; Can you really say that the second bit of code is more "complex"? Same goes for stolen driver signing keys and so…
Yes. Take fastinvsqrt() for example. Cleve Moler learned about this trick from code written by William Kahan and K.C. Ng at Berkeley around 1986.
float fastInvSqrt(float x) {
int i = *(int*)&x;
i = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1);
float y = *(float*)&i;
return y * (1.5F - 0.5F * x * y * y);
}
Simple instructions, VERY complex code. Not as complex as this one, though, which took almost 20 years to come about: float fastInvSqrt(float x) {
int i = *(int*)&x;
i = 0x5f375a86 - (i >> 1);
float y = *(float*)&i;
return y * (1.5F - 0.5F * x * y * y);
}
Chris Lomont says "The new constant 0x5f375a86 appears to perform slightly better than the original one. Since both are approximations, either works well in practice. I
would like to find the original author if possible, and see if the method was derived or just guessed and tested."Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are a family, as in, all of them were almost certainly created by the same group. Symantec said that Duqu is "near identical" to Stuxnet. As for Flame, Kaspersky[0] initially said that it contains no resemblance to Stuxnet, and then later on discovered that they've even shared a zero day in their early versions. From my understanding, I don't necessarily consider them as different software, more as a single soft…
Out of topic but your defense for referencing Kaspersky makes me wonder why people would see a problem with it? I'm not familiar with the field and don't know who's who.
Otherwise it's just your basic mudslinging; Both Kaspersky and US security companies are likely to do their governments favours, in particular by selectively not reporting things, both willingly and under pressure. If you're a US citizen working for a US security company and you'd stumble upon a US malware operation that appears to be doing something benign, such as preventing nuclear whatnots, you might be disinclined to report on it for fear of ruining a US malware mission--and even look past the fact that they're using such a risky, dangerous type of software to do it (being a worm/virus, remember that Stuxnet also disrupted and got into places that weren't targets).
Back when Stuxnet was active, I closely followed the story and the existence of the (airgap-hopping) virus was discovered long before people got any solid ideas about its purpose. When finally the first reports came that the special control software checked for machines running on a frequency that were only used in either some Finnish industrial plant or these Iranian refineries[0], the first reports on this did not come from a US security company.
[0] This part is a bit vague sorry. I wish I had sourced/fact-checked this part of the story better, years ago. There was so much going on.
Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every nation has to trust the country with nukes that they won't invade or destroy them. If you were Iran, would you trust the US not to try to invade or topple your country? Iran isn't alone with the rhetoric of 'destroy your enemies'. North Korea and the US sell the same story, just the enemy changes. Whether the enemy is Israel, the US, or the arbitrary definition of a terrorist, the sell is ultimately a strategy…
The difference is, Iran and North Korea are demonstrably more evil and repressive regimes than the Unites States.