Can You Win a War With Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence?

Is it really possible to identify, and calculate the severity, of potential military treats by using algorithms and open source data? The US Navy seem to think so. Moreover, the Navy wants you – researchers, coders and other creative computer  geeks – to help them write this software.

“ We want to do business with educational institutions, nonprofit and for-profit organizations with ground-breaking ideas, pioneering scientific research and novel technology developments.”

Office of Naval Research

It was actually the tech pros over at wired.com that put me on to the Office of Naval Research and their ongoing activities. I’ll tell you, these guys have some amazing projects underway! DNA-computers, broadband connected helmets with the ability to communicate directly with a soldiers brain, radio frequencies that can do several things at once, mathematical models (algorithms) that not only can predict human behaviour but also influence people.

It is one of three main areas of research at the moment; to put together a network of different sensors (thermometers, microphones. webcams, you-name-it) connected to one powerful supercomputer who is able to calculate and predict whatever the US Navy wants to know.

“Better algorithms that can enable the development of “key technologies that will enable rapid, accurate decision-making by autonomous processes in complex, time varying highly dynamic environments that are probed with heterogeneous sensors and supported by open source data,” according to a new call for research papers from the Office of Naval Research.

One of its new special program announcements for 2013 identifies software algorithms as a major point of concern: It wants more robust logic tools play nicely across hardware and software platforms, pre-assembling a mosaic of threats.

One subset of that research is called Sensor Management and Allocation. Its goal: to “optimally task and re-task large sensors networks [sic] based on current picture and sensor availability to understand the battle space and maintain dynamic persistent surveillance.”

A related effort, called Automated Image Understanding, gets more explicit. It’s about “detection and tracking of objects on water or in urban areas and inferring the threat level they may pose” — sharply enough that the algorithm should be able to pick out “partially occluded objects in urban clutter.”

All this in real-time, of course.

Notice that the Navy isn’t talking about developing new hardware that can automatically spot the dangerous, partially concealed things in water or in urban areas. It’s got that stuff already, and on deck. The new algorithms are about making all of that gear much, much smarter, and more deeply integrated — or, at least, it might, if defense hardware manufacturers’ software weren’t proprietary, wired.com notes.

Technically speaking, the challenge here is to figure out how to represent distant objects caught within a field of vision as threatening; calculating the degree of threat; and weighting those threats when integrating them with either different images or images of the same field at an earlier time. Narrow your field too finely and you’ll miss threats; widen it too much and you’ll be awash in information.

The Navy, however, also want algorithms that calculates the level of uncertainty.

“If the process is to be automated and timely relative to a mission, then algorithms must be implemented that can sense, interpret, reason and successfully act in an open world with uncertain, incomplete, imprecise, and contradictory data.”

MORE@ “Irreducible Uncertainty and the Limits of Predictability“

.

What’s So Great About DNA Computing?

It’s another main research are of the US Navy, and I can assure you that this is not just another fancy toy.

By definition, DNA computing is a form of computing which uses DNA, biochemistry and molecular biology, instead of the traditional silicon-based computer technologies.

That’s right. It means implementing human (organic) materials into a computer chip.

The original idea of DNA computing was to find a more effective way to solve  NP-hard problems., (NP-hard problems may be of any type: decision problems, search problems, or optimizational), because a DNA-based microchip is able to handle many more processes at the same time, compared to the traditional silicon chip.

And with those heavy algorithms the US Navy are imagining, they probably need one.

But there’s more. The Navy is particularly interested in “DNA-Based Molecular-Scale Nanofabrication.”

By combining DNA computing with nanotechnology it is probably possible to manipulate or change human DNA of living people, according to research.

“The program seeks to exploit the extraordinary combination of resolution, throughput and flexibility of DNA nanotechnology to build functional electronic and computational devices and systems.”

Now, we’re talking!

MORE@”DNA-Based Molecular-Scale Nanofabrication“

.

Replacing Heads?

The last, but not least, important task for the US Navy is to develop a new high-tech helmet, with a built-in broadband connection and the ability to interact with soldiers, through images, audio and even remotely change the mindset, the mood  and the body chemistry of those who wear it.

I better explain:

According to the Office for Naval Research the intention behind developing a new helmet made of something called polymer is to reduce the number of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) during combat.

The research concentration areas are described as:

• Theory, molecular simulation, computer-aided materials design
• Polymer synthesis, polymer formulation and characterization
• Dynamic mechanical analysis and other characterization methods of polymer dynamics
• High-rate loading, constitutive modeling of the polymer, nonlinear dynamic simulation of the multi-system (helmet/elastomer/head) and shock tube testing

But Polymer is a very interesting material. Among other capabilities it can store information.

Ploymer can also be used to make optoelectrical devices, such as light-emitting diodes, transistors, molecular switches, photovoltaic cells, chemical and biological sensors, and large-area flexible displays, and so on….

MORE@”Elastomeric Polymer-by-Design to Protect the Warfighter Against Traumatic Brain Injury by Diverting the Blast Induced Shock Waves from the Head“

Connect this helmet to the DNA computers, running the super-algorithms, and you got………..an intelligent but very ugly hat, making you look unpredictable stupid.

As said before: Artificial intelligence is no match for human stupidity.

DOWNLOAD:

1. Long Range Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for Navy and Marine Corps Science and Technology
2. Basic Research Challenge (BRC) Program

Related by the econoTwist’s:

• Espen G. Haug: Algorithms Should Be Monitored On A Daily Basis
• “Artificial Intelligence” To Be Implemented In HFT
• May 6. 2010: “The Black Thursday”
• Internet Nuke Bomb Ready To Blow

Related articles

• Navy Wants You to Write Algorithms That Automatically ID Threats (wired.com)
• DNA transistors pave way for living computers (newscientist.com)
• ‘Robo-reporter’ computer program raises questions about future of journalists (vancouversun.com)
• Biological computer created with human DNA (digitalcollaboration.wordpress.com)

If You Can’t Kill the Internet by DDoS, Try An Axe

It’s said to be more than 500 ways to kill a cat. How many ways there is to kill the Internet is yet to be determined, but some people seems very keen to find out:  Reuters reports, Thursday, that the Egyptian coastguard have intercepted a fishing boat off the coast of Alexandria and arrested three men in the act of trying to cut through the SEA-ME-WE 4 undersea cable. The cable is one of the main Internet connections between Asia and Europe, transporting 1,28 terabytes of data.

“Multiple sub sea cable cuts have been confirmed off the northern coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea, which are impacting a number of cable systems in Africa, Middle East and Asia connecting to Europe,”

Seacom

The Internet does not live in anything resembling a cloud (yet). Instead it resides in hundreds of cables snaking underground and along the bottom of the sea, where it is susceptible to ship anchors, marine life, and sabotage. That’s exactly the kind of attack that seems to be underway. The past week we have seen reports of several severed cables off the coast of Egypt.

According to Reuters, the Egyptian coastguard intercepted a fishing boat off the coast of Alexandria and arrested three men trying to cut through the SEA-ME-WE 4 undersea cable, yesterday. The cable is one of the main connections between Asia and Europe, running from France to Malaysia and linking Italy, north Africa, the middle east and south Asia.

The men are at the moment being interrogated by Egyptian authorities. Their identities are still unknown.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The Egyptian navy have  uploaded their pictures on Facebook, so if you recognize any of them, please notify the authorities via this link.

Over the past week there has been several reports of severed cables off near the coast of Egypt that are part of Seacom, a network of cables serving much of Africa.

Seacom officials have up to now suspected careless ships. But the arrest of the three men yesterday suggests there could a concerted effort to take down Egypt’s connectivity.

A similar spate of cuts affected the region in 2008, though no culprit was officially established.

Most big countries have several redundant cables landing on their shores. But the loss of even a single one means that all the traffic must be jammed through remaining connections, causing congestion. And there is nothing to stop determined attackers from targeting several cables.

Many cables go through geographic chokepoints like the Suez, and it wouldn’t be difficult to disrupt a whole bunch of connections for a period of time.

Yesterday’s attacks on the Internet’s infrastructure – the Cyberbunker attack and the Egyptian cable cutters – show two ways of waging asymmetric war in the Internet era.

If your aim is a single company, it helps to know how to wrangle thousands of zombie computers into a precise, targeted attack. That also has the benefit of allowing regular users—and the attackers themselves—to stay online.

But if your target is bigger, say a country or a continent, all it takes to cripple the network is scuba gear and a few sharp-edged tools, qz.com writes.

In other words: If you see someone lurking around with a snorkel and an axe – call the police !

Related by econoTwist’s:

• Real Mafia War Online; Could Crash the Global Internet
• US Banks Hit by Largest Cyber Attack Ever (But Won’t Admit It)
• USA Ready to Launch Cyber Attack, NSA Chief Says
• Kaspersky: “Humanity Not Ready To Deal With The Dangers of Cyber Weapons”

Other related articles:

• Egyptian navy captures divers trying to cut undersea internet cables (go.theregister.com)
• SEACOM’s recovery cable fails, causing yet another internet slowdown (techzim.co.zw)

Real Mafia War Online; Could Crash the Global Internet

Last week econoTwist’s reported on what most likely was tha largest cyber attack on US banks, ever. Now, it turns out, that it was only the beginning of something much larger – and even more scarier - the largest computer attack in the history of the Internet. The biggest DDoS attack ever recorded is said to be  jamming crucial infrastructure all over the world and causing widespread congestion. But this has nothing to do with the Anonymous or other online activists – this is in fact the first full-blown real mafia war online we’ve ever seen. I’m afraid it won’t be the last.

“These guys are just mad.”

Patrick Gilmore

According to BBC, five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks. The attackers have used a well-known  tactic called “Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS),” which floods the intended target with large amounts of traffic in an attempt to render it unreachable. But they have also found a way to amplify the effect, creating a data-tsunami of 300 gigabyte per second – three times larger than any DDoS attack we’ve seen before.

The intended main target appears to be Spamhaus, a European organization that maintains a blacklist of ISPs that supposedly host “spam gangs” and who refuse to stop serving them as customers.

Spammers are – plain and simple – the marketeers of organized crime, making it possible for counterfeit products, medicine and illegal (child) pornography to reach potential customers worldwide. They are the “street pushers” of internet dope.

And the competition seems to have reached  a whole new level.

As you can imagine, Spamhaus has no shortage of enemies, given its line of business. But most rumors point to the Dutch spammer CyberBunker who that prides in hosting anything –  except terrorist material and child pornography. Cyberbunker brags on its Web site that it has been a frequent target of law enforcement because of its “many controversial customers.” The company also claims that at one point it fended off a Dutch SWAT team. “Dutch authorities and the police have made several attempts to enter the bunker by force,” the site says. “None of these attempts were successful.”

However, up until now these cyber cowboys have fought their internal battles mostly by blocking each others traffic. But this time the Dutch were really, really angry.

Sven Olaf Kamphuis, an Internet activist who claims he is a spokesman for the attackers, says in an online message to The New York Times that  Cyberbunker was retaliating against Spamhaus for “abusing their influence.” 

according to the NYT, they got help from Eastern European and Russian gangs.

“Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the Internet. They worked themselves into that position by pretending to fight spam,” Mr. Kamphuis says.

Spamhaus is pretty resilient, as its own network is distributed across many countries, but the attack was still enough to knock its site offline on March 18. A spokesman for Spamhaus says the attacks began on March 19, but have so far not stopped the group from distributing its blacklist.

Patrick Gilmore, chief architect at Akamai Technologies, confirms Spamhaus’s role as generator of Internet spammer lists.

Commenting on Cyberbunker, he says: “These guys are just mad. To be frank, they got caught. They think they should be allowed to spam.”

Mr. Gilmore also explains that the attacks consists of concentrate data streams that are larger than the Internet connections of entire countries.

He compares the technique to using a machine gun to spray an entire crowd when the intent is to kill one single person.

If you want to read what the involved parties have to say for themselves - here are some links:

•  CyberBunker
• A2B
• Spamhaus

Amplified Attack

What makes this case specially interesting (and disturbing) is that the cyber criminals seems to have found a way to amplify the attacks.

Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey, one of the UK’s premier computer security experts, says that the attack “seems to be orders of magnitude larger than anything seen before,” and highlights the technique that’s been used.

“The thing that got people talking is that it’s a DNS amplification attack. The point is, if you’re targeting something and  the target has a 10 Gbps switch, you only have to throw 11 Gbps at it and you’ve pole-axed the system. If it is at 300 Gbps, then potentially some of the main infrastructure is being affected, though I’m not sure how much it’s really affecting it.”

The company that Spamhouse called for help, (Cloudflare), provides an even more detailed explanation:

“The largest source of attack traffic against Spamhaus came from DNS reflection… This method has become the source of the largest Layer 3 DDoS attacks we see (sometimes well exceeding 100Gbps). Open DNS resolvers are quickly becoming the scourge of the Internet and the size of these attacks will only continue to rise until all providers make a concerted effort to close them…”

“The basic technique of a DNS reflection attack is to send a request for a large DNS zone file with the source IP address spoofed to be the intended victim to a large number of open DNS resolvers. The resolvers then respond to the request, sending the large DNS zone answer to the intended victim. The attackers’ requests themselves are only a fraction of the size of the responses, meaning the attacker can effectively amplify their attack to many times the size of the bandwidth resources they themselves control.”

Exactly, How Dangerous?

Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, says that this kind of attack power would be strong enough to take down government internet infrastructure.

“If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly, They would be completely off the internet.”

“They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down,” Mr Linford says.

“There’s certainly possibility for some collateral damage to other services along the way, depending on what that infrastructure looks like,” says Dan Holden,  director of security research at Arbor Networks.

“If it was done really seriously in a wider attack, then it could affect many users. Trying to take down the whole internet is impractical, but you could start to decapitate sections of it,” Professor Alan Woodward says, according to gigaom.com.

So, just to summarize:

• We now have local police trawling Facebook in search of gang activity.
• The FBI is busy chasing trolls who mocks them by hacking their computers.
• Governments are making laws to forbid people from speaking their mind on their personal blogs.
• Meanwhile, the really dangerous cyber criminals are experimenting with new cyber weapons with unimaginable destruction power. 

Related by econoTwist’s:

• US Banks Hit by Largest Cyber Attack Ever (But Won’t Admit It)
• USA Ready to Launch Cyber Attack, NSA Chief Says
• Kaspersky: “Humanity Not Ready To Deal With The Dangers of Cyber Weapons”
• FBI Agents Hit By Coulrophobia
• Secret Plan Exposed: UN to Take Control Over the World’s Internet
• Online Activities To Be Criminalized in Norway

Other related articles:

• Spam spat escalates into ‘biggest DDoS attack ever’ (information-age.com)
• Worlds biggest DDoS attack is now ongoing at 300Gbps (Ruchirablog.com)
• Week-long DDoS attack against Spamhaus ‘largest in history’ (electronista.com)
• Global Net’s DNS Servers Hit by Biggest DDoS Attack Ever (cio-today.com)
• There’s a Huge Cyber Attack Slowing Down the Internet Because of Spam (geekosystem.com)