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The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

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Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#461

Post by forapurpose »

graeme wrote: post #398
forapurpose wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While my humble opinion is that MAD was effective, let's be careful not to infer causation from a sequence of events (the rooster crows and then the sun rises). And the events of 'MAD' and 'peace' are not in sequence: WWII ended in 1945. MAD wasn't an idea until the 1960s and not implemented in a treaty until the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, AFAICT.[0] It makes more sense if you remember that nuclear wea…

Your timeline is wrong. Bernard Brodie came up with Nuclear deterrence in 1946. The Soviets would have read his work or understood the implicatikns. There was a reason they raced to get the bomb.

> Bernard Brodie came up with Nuclear deterrence in 1946. The Soviets would have read his work or understood the implicatikns. There was a reason they raced to get the bomb.

Mutually Assured Destruction is not the same as Brodie's Nuclear Deterrence AFAIK (which admittedly isn't much). In 1946, neither side could come close to assuring destruction of the other; the Soviets didn't have any atomic bombs until 1949, the U.S. didn't have the H-bomb until 1954, and of course neither had ICBMs, The best production rocket was probably the V-2.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#462

Post by qop »

perlgeek wrote: post #236

I'd argue that Google Search is much more sophisticated than Stuxnet. Windows is much more sophisticated. Linux is more sophisticated than Stuxnet. The list goes on. We tend to ignore the sophistication of things we are familiar with, and hype those that surprise. But that's not a fair measure of anything.

Several years later, and even with the code, researchers are not able to summarize a complete list of what stuxnet definitely does.

What I see here is that the word "sophistication" is misunderstood by a lot of people.

Stuxnet took control of multiple layers of complex production environments. There are numerous "0day" kits in the code.

It's not like an effort like a search engine or most other organized software projects, because there are logistical dependencies of the worm itself in those exploits. If it was a US-israel effort (I think it almost definitely was, but who cares) then consider how much discipline and effort it takes to keep TWO govt groups of hackers coordinated enough to keep those exploits fresh, whilst simultaneously building a dependable worm.

Another thing, a lot of the actual machinery and shit isn't very well known, and this is worth mentioning because it's not like you can go spin up an emulator for this shit to test out your massively devastating two-country worm on.

Stuxnet of course made the best of this by using lots of different exploits in different situations, giving it the biggest attack surface it could, that's low hanging fruit anyways.

I think stuxnet doesn't impress people because maybe they think it's just a bunch of bugs in old shitty software, but it's so much more than that. It's bugs in software that only a few hundred or maybe a few thousand people have ever seen, much less pentested, on machinery that's rare and sometimes even unique to the location, the infrastructure of the place is based on rough intel at best, and oh by the way, your spy hackers need to coordinate with this other group on the other side of the planet.

Start brainstorming how you'd pull it off, and I think it'll become more imrpressive as you do.

Personally, I think it's the most incredible display of skill and prowess in malware thus far. The years I've spent disassembling, reversing, tracing, filtering, researching... A lifetime of hacking doesn't even knock the dust off of a project like that.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#463

Post by graeme »

forapurpose wrote: post #461
graeme wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your timeline is wrong. Bernard Brodie came up with Nuclear deterrence in 1946. The Soviets would have read his work or understood the implicatikns. There was a reason they raced to get the bomb.

> Bernard Brodie came up with Nuclear deterrence in 1946. The Soviets would have read his work or understood the implicatikns. There was a reason they raced to get the bomb. Mutually Assured Destruction is not the same as Brodie's Nuclear Deterrence AFAIK (which admittedly isn't much). In 1946, neither side could come close to assuring destruction of the other; the Soviets didn't have any atomic bombs until 1949, the…

I haven't actually read Brodie, I'm just going on my memory from my strategic studies class. But my recollection is that he more or less fully fleshed out nuclear warfare theory in 1946. The tech wasn't there, but the logic of the weapons was.

MAD is less a strategy than a reality. As long as each side has weapons that can't be credibly destroyed in a first strike, you have MAD, whether theorists explicitly call for it or not.

Though of course submarines make this easier to achieve in practice.

I might be wrong about this though, perhaps there were significant differences between Brodie's 1946 theory and later MAD developments.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#464

Post by ImSkeptical »

csomar wrote: post #457
thaumasiotes wrote: post #453

Earlier 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.

Complexity is about the number of interoperating parts. A math problem like 75533787543269^634678 may be difficult to do with pen and paper, but it's not complicated, whereas, take the result of 5^2, divide by the number of e's in these song lyrics, take that number of steps due North, and incline your head 60° while facing 3 o'clock - is a complicated set of directions even if none of the calculations are as difficult as the simpler one above.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#465

Post by ImSkeptical »

chris_wot wrote: post #446
vkou wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.99% of the time, Windows works just fine for me. Stuxnet only needed to work once.

It worked multiple times. And it needed to propagate, undetected, for months until it made its way into the nuclear facility. It didn’t just work once.

Still, Windows, or Android, works on hundreds of millions of machines for long periods of time. Stuxnet is a feat of engineering, but it's not as sophisticated as millions of lines of code written by tens of thousands of software developer over decades.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#466

Post by mahdixareie »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #266
perlgeek wrote: post #236

I'd argue that Google Search is much more sophisticated than Stuxnet. Windows is much more sophisticated. Linux is more sophisticated than Stuxnet. The list goes on. We tend to ignore the sophistication of things we are familiar with, and hype those that surprise. But that's not a fair measure of anything.

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…

This is not a normal malware, it's warfare and it's obvious who ever was behind it, is not a normal person. In my opinion it's probably one of Israel acts against Iran.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#467

Post by forapurpose »

graeme wrote: post #463
forapurpose wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bernard Brodie came up with Nuclear deterrence in 1946. The Soviets would have read his work or understood the implicatikns. There was a reason they raced to get the bomb. Mutually Assured Destruction is not the same as Brodie's Nuclear Deterrence AFAIK (which admittedly isn't much). In 1946, neither side could come close to assuring destruction of the other; the Soviets didn't have any atomic bombs until 1949, the…

I haven't actually read Brodie, I'm just going on my memory from my strategic studies class. But my recollection is that he more or less fully fleshed out nuclear warfare theory in 1946. The tech wasn't there, but the logic of the weapons was. MAD is less a strategy than a reality. As long as each side has weapons that can't be credibly destroyed in a first strike, you have MAD, whether theorists explicitly call for…

Thanks. A couple things I don't think are accurate, based on my limited knowledge:

> As long as each side has weapons that can't be credibly destroyed in a first strike, you have MAD

With the significant qualifier that you need enough weapons to survive to completely destroy the enemy.

> MAD is less a strategy than a reality

I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. It was and is a specific strategy and implementing it was the reason for the ABM treaty and others - defensive weapons would make destruction less "assured". See the source I linked above.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#468

Post by danielroe »

lucideer wrote: post #307
donald_fump wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

upvoted thanks

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophistication > Sophistication has come to mean a few things, but its original definition was "to denature, or simplify". Today it is common as a measure of refinement So no, it can in many cases even be the precise opposite of complexity. It actually originally comes from "sophistry", which is an ancient greek discipline of wisdom and excellence. I would generally associate the wo…

The sophists, as you say, were ancient Greek teachers.

But sophistry now means something rather different: using subtle, specious reasoning to deceive.

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