sabotaging science must be the most morally corrupt thing you can do as a civilisation
How about killing scientists and engineers? [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassinations_of_Iranian_nucl...
Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
31–40 of 107 posts
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do wonder if these breadcrumbs were also left intentionally. “Oh look, we are using old stuff, don’t be afraid!” Or for some other reason. It is a little surprising to pull off such a sophisticated attack and miss details you could find running ‘strings’ unless I’m missing something and this part was encrypted.
I think that in the time period we're talking about, RCS wasn't really even all that old. Like, RCS is old, sure, but it was also in common use especially by Unix systems people; it's what you might have reached for by default to version your dotfiles, for instance.
Yes, but even back then I was aware of the sections in executables (wasn’t this where it was found?) and any neckbeard from the 70s and 80s might be even more so aware. That said, yeah, sure, it’s a very possible and understandable oversight, but I’m weary because of all the text in viruses and such as indicators. Seems like a pass over ‘strings’ would be obvious. Though. TIL, strings doesn’t necessarily scan the entire executable.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#33My favorite part of this was: That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments — The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s.…
>in 2006 was still using svn
Perhaps you meant cvs? Subversion was released in 2004 and git appeared in 2005.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#34sabotaging science must be the most morally corrupt thing you can do as a civilisation
The first thing I thought of was The 3-Body Problem series. If you've read the books (or watched the shows you'll know what I mean).
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#35heh the key move is the worm. you can't catch it by checking on a second box because there is no clean box.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#36Thank you for sharing this. I was recently pushing the limits of precision computing and this illuminated a part of my research. It built on top of largely government funded research, where I found a surprising dearth of available precision frameworks with verification. Perhaps national security interests, as elucidated by the original poster, discourages transparency of methods for arbitrary precision calculations.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#37My favorite part of this was: That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments — The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s.…
>in 2006 was still using svn Perhaps you meant cvs? Subversion was released in 2004 and git appeared in 2005.
We used cvs, but did switch to svn before/around 2006, but I could be mixing that up. We did not switch to git even by 2012 when I left.
The reference to the 70s and 80s code didn’t imply it was version controlled before svn/cvs though if that’s what you meant, but by that time it was and still had old timestamps commented in the text files.
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#38My favorite part of this was: That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments — The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s.…
Yeah, I used to be skeptical of the government provenance of things like Stuxnet (I am not any more, I'm fully sold, like everyone else), and notes like this were why. People used RCS well into the 2000s! RCS as a tool had virtues over SVN and CVS.
My favorite part of the paper is that the “attack” isn’t just exploiting a bug — it’s exploiting how different components interpret the same input. Modifying an executable as it’s loaded into memory is one example, but the deeper pattern is the mismatch.
What’s interesting about the malware in this post is that it goes one step further: instead of exploiting mismatches, it corrupts the computation itself — so every infected system agrees on the same wrong answer!
More broadly: any interpretive mismatch between components creates a failure surface. Sometimes it shows up as a bug, sometimes as an exploit primitive, sometimes as a testing blind spot. You see it everywhere — this paper, IDS vs OS, proxies vs backends, test vs prod, and now LLMs vs “guardrails.”
Fun HN moment for me: as I was about to post this, I noticed a reply from @tptacek himself. His 1998 paper with Newsham (IDS vs OS mismatches) was my first exposure to this idea — and in hindsight it nudged me toward infosec, the Atlanta scene, spam filtering (PG's bayesian stuff) and eventually YC.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/731-sp04/readings/Ptacek-N...
The paper starts with this Einstein quote "Not everything that is counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted", which seems quite apt for the malware analyzed here :)
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#39My favorite part of this was: That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments — The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s.…
Does that mean that three-letter agencies were/are able to recruit from the fields for each type of malware? For example, fast16 might actually be written by someone who used to write scientific calculation software, while Stunex was written by someone who used to work for Siemens?
Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
#40My favorite part of this was: That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments — The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s.…
>in 2006 was still using svn Perhaps you meant cvs? Subversion was released in 2004 and git appeared in 2005.
Subversion 1.0 was released in 2004, but it was already widely used before then.