Explosive Cold War Trojan has lessons for Open Source exporters

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/36270.html

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 16/03/2004

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 [1] 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."


Tools you can trust

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
will have a lasting advantage.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0891418210/c4iorg



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