[spoilers]What happens when Shannon Foraker meets...

Any computer is easy to hack if you are the trusted user.

Foraker was the fleet tactical officer - the person who creates the fire control plans for the entire fleet, both offense and defense.

We have seen how tacnets override local control on all aspects of fire control, offensive and defensive. They have to explicitly give control back to a ship to let it fire anything on its own. (numerous text examples, starting with Honor of the Queen for a 3-ship tacnet, Hancock-station for a battlesquadron tacnet etc)

Furthermore, in emergencies, we've seen ships to go computerized fire control on a single command. It seems plausible that a fleet could do so as well (eg, if another force hypers-in accidently on top of your fleet)

Therefore, if you are the fleet admiral's tactical officer, you already have the privileges to order every weapon in the fleet to fire. There isn't any "hacking" involved.

Now it may be that you are only granted that privilege when the fleet goes to battle stations or during fleet simulations. In which case some hacking might have been needed to spoof the tacnet into thinking either a simulation or a real battle was happening. Likewise it might have been required to spoof the IFF signals so weapons would lock up on friendlies (there may or may not be automatic lockouts. Possibly not, given that Statesec's explicit mission was to shoot at any wallers that went rogue).

Again though, we know that for simulations, all of that stuff is done. So the capability and privileges almost certainly exist at the fleet tactical officer's station.

See...in most navies this isn't a risk. You don't entrust that position to somebody who will blow up your whole fleet. (such a person could also sabotage your defensive fire in a real battle, allowing the enemy to toast the fleet too)

=========

By contrast - the fleet tac officer has no reason to be able to access anything in the engine room, aside from read-only status symbols used for indicating readiness states or battle damage. Even with the stupid computer setups on statesec ships like the Tepes, Harkness had to be physically on the ship to tap in. I can't see a remote signal being allowed to blow the fusion plant even for statesec. That's just begging an enemy to spoof your external sensors and blow you up.

You have to risk the vulnerability on the fire control in order to have a tacnet at all. But it's beyond imagination that the engine room could be remote-controlled.

On the "easily hackable computers", I suspect that as tools/methods for preventing hacking become better, tools/methods for hacking will become better.

IMO it will always be a contest between system defenders and system hackers.

There will always be people who'll try to crack a "perfect system defense" and some will find a way to beat the "perfect system defense".

The most system defenders will be able to do is make it hard to break in.

Harkness was said to be a very good hacker against Manticore computer systems and it was definitely stated that Tepes' computer system defenses were poorer than Manticore computer system defenses.

JohnRoth wrote:As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but then I'm probably biased, being a retired software developer.

If you want something to keep more or less working while the enemy is shooting holes in it, you distribute the control elements (that is, the computers) and put them as close to the sensors and effectors as possible. That way, if the sensors get blown into space kitties, so do their data reduction computers, and likewise for the fire control computers at the laser and graser stations. And if the sensors and effectors are still in operating condition, so are their control elements.

There's a phrase I'm going to borrow from someone else, somewhere else: two thousand years. There are a lot of things that are problems today which I'm having a real hard time believing haven't been solved in two thousand years, and easily hackable computers are one of them.

Imprimus,
Foraker was *not* trusted to use the StateSec ships.

Secundus, that mistrust didn't matter,
she was so much better than they were.

HTM

[quote="solbergb"]
Any computer is easy to hack if you are the trusted user.

Foraker was the fleet tactical officer - the person who creates the fire control plans for the entire fleet, both offense and defense.

There are two competing drives in C3 (command, control, communication), the first is security (don't let people who should not have access near your data) and the second is performance.

The benefits to a free flowing tactical link, where all friendlies in the battlespace are sharing real time sensor input, are incalculable. As a force multiplier, it is hard to beat. Nations in the top tier (or like the Sollies who consider themselves top tier even when they are not), focus on the killing power the information sharing gives them, and commit the natural sin of believing their security specialists promises about how good their system security is.

Those who are punching above their weight class, like Haven, accept the trade off of more vulnerable systems as they try to match the performance of equipment that is a generation better than their own.

State Sec and Battlefleet had such a culture of superiority that the idea that anyone other than them was intellectually capable of working around their security measures simply wouldn't occur to them. They were the superior life form, all others were little better than mindless sheep, so why worry? Its not like Horace Harkness is going to co-opt your system and blow up a battlecruiser, right?

It could be that the SS end line users simply didn't comprehend the vulnerabilities inherent in the network as well as the people in the Navy.

One is a street fighter, the other is a classically trained jujitsu practitioner.

Both can brawl, but one understands the tangle of limbs on a much deeper level.

To the street fighter, it's a fight...to he JJ guy, it's math in motion...

And Shannon is very good at math.

Howard T. Map-addict wrote:Imprimus,
Foraker was *not* trusted to use the StateSec ships.

I'm not so sure of that. The statesec SD's were part of the fleet tacnet when they were used in wall of battle in Ashes of Victory (whatever that final Peep offensive before Buttercup was, I can't recall the name at the moment).

The fiction was that they were reinforcements. The people on the Statesec SD's don't want to die because they aren't part of the wall and thus the tacnet when fighting Manties. (or be responsible for the fleet LOSING the battle because they hung back and didn't participate).

At the time of Oops, they were also there to make sure the regular navy stood and fought, doing whatever damage they could before the Manties swept over them. Again, that isn't gonna happen unless they're part of the wall of battle too.

So yeah, Foraker probably did have the codes to tie them in to the tacnet. If she didn't, the fleet wouldn't be able to respond properly if the Manties came over the hyper wall, as they were expected to do any day now.

Edit - you actually gotta be pretty careful of streetfighters. They've been in real fights and they're unpredictable. In the pathetic 2 years of martial arts training I had > 20 years ago, my Karate Sensei was very respectful of both the typical street thug and boxers. The thug, because he's used to actually hitting real people, is used to getting hurt and if he's still around, he's got some style that works for him, plus you're likely to be in his favored environment. The boxers, because he thought what they do is extremely challenging from a technical standpoint - the limitations of the rules, gloves and allowed targets make it very hard to exert real force, much moreso than most real life situations.

solbergb wrote:Edit - you actually gotta be pretty careful of streetfighters. They've been in real fights and they're unpredictable. In the pathetic 2 years of martial arts training I had > 20 years ago, my Karate Sensei was very respectful of both the typical street thug and boxers. The thug, because he's used to actually hitting real people, is used to getting hurt and if he's still around, he's got some style that works for him, plus you're likely to be in his favored environment. The boxers, because he thought what they do is extremely challenging from a technical standpoint - the limitations of the rules, gloves and allowed targets make it very hard to exert real force, much moreso than most real life situations.

Street fighters may not be technically very good, but they are probably armed and know a lot about winning fights. And some thugs are quite good, nothing keeps them from training at the boxing gym or a MMA studio.

A good boxer is a serious problem. Boxers get hit all the time by people who know how to hit. Hence he quite likely can take your best shot once or twice and give you an opportunity to see if you can take his best shot.

Yeah. That's why people like me were trained to spar as if all of the following is true

1. The other guy is bigger than you, has reach
2. The other guy is stronger than you
3. The other guy is faster than you
4. The other guy is more skilled than you
5. Nothing short of a crippling or lethal blow will slow the other guy down.

All of this is depressingly likely at my level of skill :) About the only advantage I have is a fair amount of reach, but I'm slow enough that's not much. The sparring was always against the brownbelts and blackbelts for that reason. It gets you used to all the ways you can screw up, but also shows the real advantage an observant, relaxed defender has if you begin the fight out of range of them flicking your eyes with their hands or some similar sucker punch.

Pretty much my only chance against a real fighter is to try to inflict a crippling wound on their very first attack (and forget about leading with an attack of my own. It just won't work unless maybe his back is turned)

Trouble is once you've actually got a lick in, they'll take you seriously. So you have to make that first shot count.

There are several schemes for constructing computers that cannot be directly hacked. One of the simplest was invented, I gather, by Steve Jobs and Apple, under the names Mac and Lisa.

The more general approach is to reject the notion that you only have one memory core. Instead, you have two cores, and two disk drives (or whatever)

The disc drive A holding the machine instructions is read-only. To change drive A, you must physically transport it to a coding machine, a machine that is not conencted to the outside world, and that can only write to but not read from the instruction disk drives.

Drive A writes to the instruction core the instructions for each program. Only Drive A can do the write.

Program data are carried on drive B and memory core B. The processors on the computer can only write to memory core B and Drive B. It is physically impossible, because there are no wires, for a user to change the contents of Drive A, or to affect the contents of core A other than by downloading different programs from Drive A.

The MAC-LISA arrangement was not quite as focused on this issue, but had many of the same effects.

Yes. I have actually met someone who bought a LISA.

That actually won't work, because the interesting stuff is on drive & core b. So once you suborn Flash or whatever minor utility on core b you have access to the actual data of interest.

And depending on how sophisticated and patient the attacker is there are ways to corrupt even secure firmware.

Ever read Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"?