The Computers of Star Trek (9 page)

Whatever evolves, security on Federation starships will be much more advanced than anything we can imagine at the moment. But no security system will ever be absolutely flawless. Consider that the transporter can instantly do a full-body scan and duplicate a person's unique DNA pattern. Transporter malfunctions created
two Captain Kirks (“The Enemy Within,”
TOS
), and two Commander Rikers (“Second Chances,”
TNG
). Unless human nature changes over the next three centuries, most likely every innovation in security will be matched by a new technique to thwart it. Still, whether the ship's crew numbers in the hundreds (as on the original
Enterprise
), or over a thousand (the
Enterprise-D
of the twenty-fourth century), there's no reason that any of them should be at risk from intruders. Unfortunately, guaranteeing the safety of the starship's computer core isn't so easy.

Having Jem'Hadar warriors beam onto the bridge of the
Defiant
with drawn phasers might make for good TV, but it is not the most likely method of attacking the ship. An assault on the starship's computer mainframe is much more promising. And a lot less risky.

The Romulans and the Borg have been tough, deadly
Star Trek
foes. But the Bynaars captured the
Enterprise
without firing a shot. (“10010011?”
TNG
)

In the trusting
Star Trek
world of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries, no one seems to worry about viruses or malignant programs until it's too late. Messages and files are routinely downloaded to starship and space station computer cores. Precautions against viruses may be in place, but if they are, they're not very effective as demonstrated by numerous incidents of code alteration that happen to the starship's main computer and the holodeck computer system. And viruses are only one of the electronic dangers facing Federation computers.

Many scientists believe that the wars of the future will be fought primarily between computer systems, not on battlefields. They feel that destroying the enemy's computer network would cause greater destruction than any bomb or biological weapon. The more advanced a society, the more vulnerable it'll be to computer warfare. Thus, the technologically dependent Federation would be a prime target for computer terrorists.

In the twenty-fourth century, sabotaging an electrical grid (“Homefront,” DS9) or tampering with a security program (“Civil Defense,”
DS9
) would be a cost effective and extremely deadly method of fighting. One person hacking into a computer network could affect billions. Hackers would be a constant danger on planets or installations where they would be able to focus their attack on large systems, tapping in unnoticed and downloading important information or tampering with system security (“Babel,”
DS9
). Still, hacking into a starship or space-station computer wouldn't be easy, especially since the network is a closed system where any intrusions are quickly noted (“Babel” DS9, “Meridian,”
DS9
, “The Quest,”
TNG
).

Other methods of attacking
Star Trek
computer systems would be more insidious and harder to detect. While a fleet of Klingon starships might not be able to conquer
Deep Space Nine
, a few lines of computer code could. The main weapons used in such attacks would include worms, Trojan horses, and the most infamous of all destructive programs, the computer virus. Hidden in an innocent-seeming transmission to a starship, they could cause catastrophic damage.

A computer worm is a program that uses flaws and holes in a network's operating system to gain access to machines and duplicate itself again and again. Worms are self sufficient; they don't need to attach themselves to another computer program to exist. They gobble up computer space and thus absorb system's resources. In 1988, a computer worm spread through thousands of computer systems hooked to the Internet in just a few days. Imagine what it could do to the Federation's network, linking hundreds of planets and thousands of starships. Furthermore, worms can be programmed to explode into life months after they infect systems.

A Trojan-horse program appears to perform a specific and useful function, but it also has a hidden, usually destructive, agenda.
It's different from a computer virus in that it doesn't reproduce and infect other computers. The “Babel” program that caused the replicators on
Deep Space Nine
to produce a deadly virus (“Babel,”
DS9
) is a perfect example of a Trojan-horse program.

Trojan-horse programs are extremely dangerous because they can be hidden in an operating system for long periods of time, unnoticed by anyone, until a specific chain of events sets them into operation. The deadly Cardassian security program that nearly destroys
Deep Space Nine
acts much like a Trojan-horse program. It is activated by events that no longer have any meaning on the station, but nearly succeeds in destroying all life on
Deep Space Nine
before it is deactivated (“Civil Defense,”
DS9
).

The ultimate Trojan-horse program in the
Star Trek
universe has to be the code found in an 87-million-year-old artifact located in the nucleus of a comet in the D‘Arsay system. The incredibly ancient program is downloaded to the
Enterprise-D
computer and takes over the ship's systems. The code uses the computer to recreate episodes of D'Arsay mythology, endangering the lives of everyone aboard the starship (“Masks,”
TNG
).

Worms and Trojan-horse programs can be dangerous, often-times deadly. Neither, however, is as harmful as a computer virus.

The simplest definition of a computer virus is a program that changes other programs so as to include a working copy of itself inside them. Most computer viruses have a secondary, often malevolent, purpose. Most are coded to spread to as many machines as possible. In many ways, computer viruses are extremely similar to their biological cousins.

Just as a biological virus needs a cell to reproduce, a computer virus needs another program for the same reason. Infected cells, like infected programs, can continue to function for a long time without showing any sign of the virus. Once a biological cell's been infected, it makes new copies of the virus to infect other
cells. A program infected by a computer virus creates new copies of the virus to infect other programs. Most important, after a certain incubation period, a virus attacks the living system containing the infected cell. Just as a computer virus attacks the system containing the corrupted program. More than one researcher has pointed out that computer viruses could almost be classified as artificial life.

Over the past decades, hundreds of new viruses have been detected and neutralized. Still, rogue programmers continue to manufacture malignant code that they release onto the Internet. And, with the increased globalization of computer technology, their aims have become increasingly dangerous.

According to
Time
magazine, during the Gulf War, a band of Dutch hackers asked Iraq for one million dollars to disrupt the U.S. military's deployment in the Middle East. No details of their plans were revealed. Fortunately for the United States, the Iraqis turned them down. Considering that the U.S. military uses the Internet for communications, the hackers could have caused serious problems for Operation Desert Storm.
¹

The Department of Defense considers cyberwar one of the greatest threats of the twenty-first century. It's difficult to believe the threat will have disappeared by the twenty-fourth century. The computer systems of Federation starships and space stations seem extremely vulnerable to the most basic incursions and disruptions. The faith crewmembers and station personnel place in such systems appears to be terribly naive. Too often, major programs such as those involving the replicator, the transporter, and the holodeck crash, causing major disasters.

A more serious problem was noted in Chapter 2. The three computer cores of the
Enterprise
are linked by faster-than-light (FTL) transmitters so that they're always 100 percent redundant. What one computer knows, all three know. That's fine if, in the
midst of a space battle, the main computer core is hit by phaser fire. The engineering computer core would immediately take control of the ship's defenses and weapons. Even a few nanoseconds can matter in a fight conducted between ships moving at impulse speeds. Still, that redundancy can be awfully dangerous if the enemy's using a virus instead of a photon torpedo.

If the three computer cores are working at FTL speeds and are 100 percent redundant, a virus imported to one core will immediately infect all three. Filters and anti-virus programs offer some degree of protection, but if they can't protect the ship's main computer, as they often can't, how can they protect the backup systems that are set for instantaneous data duplication? Total redundancy would lead to total disaster. Computer viruses are mostly ignored on
Star Trek
. They shouldn't be.

Which brings us to our final topic involving computer security in the twenty-fourth century, the subject that's the center of any discussion of involving military or government security today—encryption. It's important now, and there's no indication that three hundred years from now it still won't be important.

Basically, encryption is writing a message in code so it can't be read by anyone other than its intended recipient. Secret codes have been popular in fiction ever since Poe's “The Gold Bug” and Conan Doyle's “The Musgrave Ritual.” Breaking the Nazi code in World War II was an important factor in defeating the Third Reich. While the government and military are prime users of encryption, it's also used by businesses and industries throughout the world to protect financial information as well as sensitive data. Obviously, the best encryption system is one that can't be broken by outsiders. Not surprisingly, modern encryption techniques involve computers.

In simple terms, encryption disguises a message so it can only be understood by someone authorized to read it. The original message, called
plaintext,
looks like ordinary text. The encryption
process typically uses one or more
keys
, which are mathematical algorithms that change the plaintext into
ciphertext
—what looks like garbled numbers, letters, and symbols. After decryption by the authorized reader of the message, the ciphertext returns to its original form, plaintext.

Encryption, like other methods of computer security, can also open systems to abuse. If you think that you're transmitting a message that's totally encrypted, you might send extremely sensitive data across a network. Suppose someone intercepts your encrypted message and hacks the key you used to turn it into ciphertext. Your sensitive data is at the mercy of the wrong people. Think about transactions that typically occur today. Lots of people do online banking. Many people purchase items on the Internet. Many people trade stocks online. A very small number of these transactions are encrypted as they course the phone lines and travel from computer server to computer server along the global net.

With all the talk about encryption, it's worthwhile to point out that very few people use it. You may have PGP keys
^h
, but nobody you know wants to learn PGP and obtain their own keys. One guy doesn't have time to study the manual, which admittedly, takes a good amount of effort. Another is afraid that his wife will accuse him of sending and receiving adulterous emails if she finds encrypted letters on his computer! There are probably dozens of legitimate reasons why people don't bother with encryption.

Personally, we favor strong encryption to protect privacy as much as we can. But this points to the general debate that's been raging for years about encryption. Some people, like us, think it's critical to our future security. Other people, like governments, think that encryption will allow bad guys to transmit secret messages about bank heists, murders, and government revolutions.
²

At the present time, almost any encryption method can be hacked by brute force. This means that a programmer tries all possible key values until he finds the correct one.

If a key is eight bits long, there are 2
⁸
or 256 possible keys. Using a programming technique that halves the possibilities and searches only the appropriate branches of a tree for a match, we guess that someone could crack the key after approximately 128 attempts.

But if an 8-bit key has 2
⁸
possible keys, then a 64-bit key has 2
⁶⁴
possible keys and a 128-bit key has 2
¹²⁸
possible keys. Bruce Schneier, the king of cryptography, says that it would take a supercomputer 585,000 years to find a correct key among 2
⁶⁴
possibilities and 10
²⁵
years to find it among 2
¹²⁸
possibilities.
³
He also points out that the universe is 10
¹⁰
years old. On the flip side, Mr. Schneier says that most large companies and criminal organizations have the resources to crack a 56-bit key, and that most military budgets suffice to crack a 64-bit key. He predicts that within thirty years, it'll be possible to break 80-bit keys.

Within a hundred years, our current technology will be dust. Hardware will change dramatically into DNA, optical, holographic, and/or quantum forms. And software will change to fit its new hosts. Methods of cryptography will change along with the hardware and software. Who knows how long it'll take a DNA computer, for example, to crack a 128-bit key coded in flesh rather than metal registers? It might be a quick job using a quantum-level computer.

In the time of
Star Trek
, nanotech implants in our bodies will dictate entirely new methods of encryption. Possibly a chemical method based on our neurotransmissions. Or an algorithm based on our blood chemistry. Or on our genetic makeup.