Page 40 - Cyber Warnings

NANOSECOND WARFARE

THE RACE TO ZERO

by Geoffrey Nicoletti, Research Analyst

Milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds. Are we speaking of low latency Wall Street
frequency trading? Or Bluffdale, Utah-data base-constructed trojans that trigger inside servers
of “x” adversary to launch cyberwarfare inside servers in “y” adversary making it look like “x”
when it is, originally, us? Attribution would take "time" and point back at the “x” adversary. Fill in
the variables any way you want (China, Russia, Iran, N. Korea, etc.) The point is that you launch
from INSIDE the enemy’s system to get millisecond speed in your attack and you make the
attribution look like someone else.

The “Flash Crash" of May 6, 2010 on Wall Street of only a few minutes---caused by a wayward
algorithm---and done in the context of removing milliseconds sheds quite a light upon
nanosecond warfare. The “race to zero” (using lasers, re-directing routers and using nearby
servers) due to latency throw the up close punch. But instead of a 600 point drop in the DOW,
you get kinetic attacks that destroy transistors (Shimomuro studied this years ago at the San
Diego Lab) and from which (RAID options/ Tier Four not withstanding) you can't recover “in
time" to replace equipment. (We still speak of BOTS and utilities being manipulated as if gas in
the car is a higher priority than oil in the car.) A straight-line approach instead of the usual zig-
zag of routers selecting routers lowers the milliseconds and, realizing you can't get a complete
trip by lasers (almost twice as fast as fiber optics), plus adding the nearness of the server might
lower the task from 13 ms to 8ms---the record of inside frequency stock trading. What is it inside
the TAO group at the NSA? Pretty much the same thing and certainly better and more powerful.
It is all about speed...it should be all about the danger of automatic analysis.

To get speed you have multi-core computers and parallel programming; if you have the best
situation it is concurrency programming with transactional memory. "Throughput": what will you
get in speed from this end to that end? And how many great programmers wrote glitch-free
code that runs through every machine that is involved? What is the cost if the wrong algorithm
gets launched? If the algorithms don’t perform the way you imagined it and the way you
programmed it, who stops cyberwar from escalating into nuclear war? Where is the seven
minute window the president had if it was a mistake that an ICBM was launched from a
submarine off the Baltic Sea? Given that attribution is time consuming (I spoke to Bruce
Schneier about that) and every millisecond means more transistors are knocked out.

Robert Joyce, who leads the TAO Group, brags publically of how much better the NSA knows
the structure of the Internet and the inner workings of your computer. It is no vain boast: his
arsenal includes the expected XKEYSCORE and Quantum Tools such as TURMOIL, TURBINE,
FOXACID, NIGHTSTAND, BULLRUN, COTTONMOUTH, QFIRE, DIODES (reports Applebaum
and “Spiegel”) and more apps that enable every aspect of cyber warfare. These apps enable
deep packet inspection, deep packet injection; they can re-direct router traffic, analyze crypto,
40 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine January 2017 Edition
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