Wire Pirates :: essays research papers

Wire Piratessomeday the Internet may become an training superhighway, but right at one time it is much like a 19th-century railroad that passes finished the badlands of the OldWest. As waves of new settlers flock to cyberspace in search for freeinformation or commercial opportunity, they venture easy marks for sharpers whoplay a keyboard as deftly as Billy the Kid ever move a six-gun.It is difficult even for those who ply it every day to value how much theInternet depends on collegial trust and mutual forbearance. The 30,000 interlink computer networks and 2.5 million or more than attached computers thatmake up the system swap gigabytes of information based on nothing more than a figure of speechal handshake with a stranger.Electronic impersonators can move slander or solicit criminal acts in someoneelses summon they can even masquerade as a trusted fella to convince someoneto reveal sensitive personal or duty information."Its like the Wild West", says Donn B. Par ker of SRI "No laws, rapid growthand initiative - its shoot first or be killed."To understand how the Internet, on which so many base their hopes for education,profit and outside(a) competitiveness, came to this pass, it can be expository to look at the security record of other parts of the internationalcommunications infrastructure.The first, biggest error that designers seem to repeat 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 extype Ale, the running war between AT&T and the phone phreaks. Whenhostilities began in the 1960s, phreaks could manipulate with relative shut up thelong-distance network in order to make unpaid band calls by playing certaintones into the receiver. One 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 unlock a trunk line.The next genesis of security were the telephone credit circulars. When the cardswere first introduced, credit card consisted of a sequence of digits (usuallyarea code, number and billing office code) followed by a " memorise digit" thatdepended on the other digits. Operators could advantageously achieve the math todetermine whether a particular credit-card number was valid. But too phreakscould easily figure out how to generate the proper check digit for any giventelephone number.So in 1982 AT&T finally put in place a more robust method. The corporationassigned each card four check digits (the "PIN", or personal identificationnumber) that could not be easily be computed from the other 10. A nationwide on-line database made the rime available to operators so that they could