In case you haven't been keeping up with developments, last week some FUD came around about how ET was gonna haxor your bank account and use it to make REALLY long distance phone calls. Well, quite unexpectedly the situation has become much, much worse. SC has unfortunately elected to lend this cruft an air of respectability by including this asinine story in their "top infosec news" category. The premise of the argument seems to be that aliens, somehow aware of the intimate details of how SETI@home works, are going to write a computer virus that will infect machines by means of the signal data sent around from SETI@home and thereby somehow cause serious damage. Just for the record, this was no less dumb when it was the plot of "Independence Day" (remember when Jeff Goldbloom wrote that computer virus that killed the alien mothership.) This kind of paranoid rambling is why physicists shouldn't do security (note that this works in reverse for all you aspiring Newtons stuck in InfoSec).
There are quite a few reasons why the premise is dumb, but let's start with the most obvious one: the nearest star is 4.3 lightyears away - this means that in the optimal case these aliens would have to come up with a way to hack not the machines of today, but the machines that we'll be running 4.3 years in the future. Humans couldn't do that, and we build the stupid things - some alien with tentacles for a face isn't going to figure out how to interact with *OUR* devices that we ourselves haven't even built yet. Look, four years ago we were all running Windows 2000 (maybe) or something older (probably) - the platform du jour is XP SP2 - a platform that hadn't been developed yet in 2001. Maybe somebody could pull off hacking a machine 4.3 years in the future if we lived on the set of the 'Hackers' movie, but not in any real life scenario.
Plus how's Xenu gonna get the source code? Telepathy? Even in the extremely unlikely scenario that these aliens were to get ahold of the most current source of the platform, understand the hardware architecture of the futre, and get a copy of the most current source of SETI@home - they would still need to understand it enough to find a vulnerability. Not to mention that they would then need to manipulate their radio emissions or whatever in order to exploit the vulnerability of the future that they somehow managed to find. Blah. That's about as likely to happen as my growing a set of wings and flying to Ming's palace myself for a preemptive strike.
Posted by Ed at November 30, 2005 03:25 PM