Explosive Cold War Trojan has lessons for Open Source exporters
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 16/03/2004 at 00:49 GMT
China has irked US wireless manufacturers by insisting that they
conform to the PRC's encryption technology, we reported last week.
Some commentators have castigated China for protecting its own
fledgling tech industry. But that excludes the country's very
understandable security concerns.
A reminder of how important these are came last week with a
revelation from the Cold War era, contained in a new book by a senior
US national security official. Thomas Reed's At The Abyss recounts
how the United States exported control software that included a
Trojan Horse, and used the software to detonate the Trans Siberian
gas pipeline in 1982. The Trojan ran a test on the pipeline that
doubled the usual pressure, causing the explosion. Reed was Reagan's
special assistant for National Security Policy at the time; he had
also served as Secretary of the Air Force from 1966 to 1977 and was a
former nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in
California. The software subterfuge was so secret that Reed didn't
know about it until he began researching the book, twenty years
later.
The scheme to plant bugs in Soviet software was masterminded by Gus
Weiss, who at the time was on the National Security Council and who
died last year. Soviet agents had been so keen to acquire US
technology, they didn't question its provenance.
"[CIA Director] Bill Casey at Weiss at the NSC decided to help the
Russians with their shopping. Every piece of sw would have an added
ingredient," Reed to NPR's Terry Gross last week.
The software sabotage had two effects, explains Reed. The first was
economic. By creating an explosion with the power of a 3 kiloton
nuclear weapon, the US disrupted supplies of gas and consequential
foreign currency earnings. But the project also had important
psychological advantages in the battle between the two superpowers.
"By implication, every cell of the Soviet leviathan might be
infected," he writes. "They had no way of knowing which equipment was
sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended
endgame for the entire operation."
The two great trading powers, China and the USA, are not currently
engaged in a Cold War. But does that mean that the Cold War lessons
are invalid?
Closed source software vendors such as Oracle and Microsoft hardly
need to be reminded of the delicacy of the subject. A year ago the
PRC signed up for Microsoft's Government Security Program, which
gives it what Redmond describes as "controlled access" to Windows
source code. But the Windows source itself doesn't guarantee that
versions of Windows will be free of Trojans. Governments need access
to the toolchain - to the compilers and linkers used to generate the
code - as that's where Trojans can be introduced. Without tools
source, licensees are faced with the prospect of tracing billions of
possible execution paths, a near impossible task.
Until the closed source vendors open up the toolchain, and use that
toolchain for verifiable builds, this is one area where software
libre [open source - Ed] will have a lasting advantage.
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