Communications - March 2011

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replicators
Viruses were not a legacy I sought.
Inevitably, someone would invent
them; the idea requires only a simple
biological analogy. But once it would
escape into the general culture, there
would be no way back, and I didn’t want
to make my professional life around it,
lucrative as it might be. The manufac-
turers of spray-paint cans likely feel the
same way…
Consider that our cities will get
smart and be able to track us with cam-
eras on the street and with microwaves
that read the chips in our phones,
computers, even embedded beneath
our skin. The first commercial use will
likely be to feed advertising to us, as in
the 2002 Steven Spielberg film Minority
Report. We’ll inevitably live in an arms
race against intrusive eyes, much as we
guard against computer viruses today.

Stuxnet, the virus known to have invaded Iran’s nuclear facilities, is apparently the first malicious code deliberately designed to disrupt targeted industrial processes, mutating on a schedule to avoid erasure, interrogating the computers it invades, and sending data back to its inventors. Stuxnet is able to reprogram Siemens-manu-factured programmable logic controllers and hide the changes it introduces into them. Commands in Stuxnet code increase the frequency of rotors in centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz uranium-enrichment plant so they fly apart. Yet much of Stuxnet’s code is unremarkable, standard stuff, lacking advanced cloaking techniques.

Still, it’s a wholly new thing—a smart virus with a grudge— evolving, self-aware, self-educating, craftily fulfilling its mission. Expect more to come. Countries hostile to the U.S. could likewise launch malware attacks against U.S. facilities, using Stuxnet-like code to attack the national power grid or other critical infrastructure.

Though seldom discussed, U.S. policy has traditionally been to lead in technology while selling last-genera-tion tech to others. Thus we are able to defeat our own prior inventions, along with sometimes deliberately installed defects we might exploit later.

[COntinueD FROM P. 112]

it’s a wholly new
thing—a smart
virus with a grudge—
evolving, self-aware,
self-educating,
craftily fulfilling
its mission.

Stuxnet looks like a kluge with inventive parts. It does not hide its payload well or cover its tracks. It will not take much effort to greatly improve such methods (with, say, virtual ma-chine-based obfuscation and novel techniques for anti-debugging), whatever the target. Once major players use them in nation-state rivalries, they will surely leak into commerce, where the stakes are immense for all of us. If Stux-type, untraceable malware becomes a weapon of commerce, our increasingly global commercial competitiveness will take on a nastier edge.

Meanwhile, if living in space becomes routine, the related systems will demand levels of maintenance and control seldom required on Earth. Consider that the International Space Station spends most of its crew time just keeping the place running—and potentially can be corrupted with malware. So can many systems to come, as our environment becomes smarter and interacts with us invisibly, around the clock. Increasing interconnection of all systems will make smart sabotage a compelling temptation. So will malware that elicits data from our lives or corrupts systems we already have, in hopes we’ll be compelled to replace them.

Now think beyond these early stages. What secondary effects could emerge? Seeds of mistrust and suspicion travel far. But that’s the world we’ll live in, with fresh problems we’ll be able to attack but only if we’ve thought them through first.

Gregory Benford ( gbenford@uci.edu) is a professor of physics at the university of California, Irvine, and a novelist, including of Timescape, winner of the 1980 nebula and british science Fiction awards.

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