Wire Pirates :: essays research papers

Wire PiratesSomeday the Internet may become an info superhighway, but right now it is much like a 19th-century railroad line that passes through the badlands of the OldWest. As waves of new settlers flock to cyberspace in search for freeinformation or commercial opportunity, they make aristocratical marks for sharpers whoplay a keyboard as deftly as billy goat the Kid ever drew a six-gun.It is difficult even for those who provide it every day to appreciate how much theInternet depends on collegiate trust and mutual forbearance. The 30,000interconnected computer networks and 2.5 million or more attached computers thatmake up the system swap gigabytes of information base on nothing more than adigital handshake with a stranger.Electronic impersonators can commit slander or solicit sorry acts in someoneelses name they can even masquerade as a trusted colleague to convince someoneto reveal tenuous personal or business information."Its like the Wild West", says Donn B. Par ker of SRI "No laws, rapid growthand enterprise - its shoot first or be killed."To understand how the Internet, on which so many base their hopes for education,profit and transnational competitiveness, came to this pass, it can beinstructive to look at the security put down of other parts of the internationalcommunications infrastructure.The first, biggest error that designers seem to recall is adoption of the"security through obscurity" strategy. Time and again, attempts to keep a systemsafe by keeping its vulnerabilities secret have failed.Consider, for example, the cut war between AT&T and the phone phreaks. Whenhostilities began in the 1960s, phreaks could manipulate with relative ease thelong-distance network in lay out to make unpaid telephone calls by playing certaintones into the receiver. one(a) phreak, John Draper, was known as "Captain Crunch"for his discovery that a modified cereal-box whistle could make the 2,600-hertztone required to un lock a trunk line.The next generation of security were the telephone credit card game. When the cardswere first introduced, credit card consisted of a sequence of digits (usuallyarea code, phone number and billing office code) followed by a "check digit" thatdepended on the other digits. Operators could easily perform the math todetermine whether a event credit-card number was valid. But also phreakscould easily figure out how to cave in the proper check digit for any giventelephone number.So in 1982 AT&T finally put in place a more robust method. The corporationassigned individually card four check digits (the "PIN", or personal identificationnumber) that could not be easily be computed from the other 10. A across the nation on-line database made the numbers available to operators so that they could