Oops

Clancy, as someone said you shouldn't be able to. Doesn't mean there aren't some bad designs out there. Just like phone freaking shouldn't have been possible way back when. (He says on his Apple Iphone)

Kytheros wrote:Car computer control systems are not designed for security. <snip>

But a warship SHOULD. We not talking about computer designs which trade power and capability for volume and cost, we're talking about full fledged computer networks. Warships are the size of office towers, and we're talking about computer networks commensurate.

Why should an Honorverse warship not worry about hacking? At missile range, sure, it would be difficult to do anything but an injection worm over the com system. But at energy range, every receiver (from the Com system to fire control) would be vulnerable to live intrusion. And how great would it be if you could just send a program and shut down the sidewalls - just for a second...

So either Hacking doesn't take place (and we know it does), or a Warship's systems are routinely hardened against it to make it impractical to even try.

Given the advantages of even a partial hack (like a Denial of Service attack making a computer system (Like CM firecontrol) just shutting down for awhile), it's unimaginable that this has not taken place/routinely takes place in Honorverse combat - heck, it might be an automatic role of the ECM systems that we have never seen succesfully work. And if so, systems have to be hardened against it, and have cofferdams between them protecting critical systems from intrusions.

It's sort of moot--we've already demonstrated that whatever Shannon did, it was not merely the equivalent of "wifi hacking". It was more like a Trojan horse which was installed by the StateSec people themselves, in routine operational files given to them by Shannon.

Theemile wrote:

Kytheros wrote:Car computer control systems are not designed for security. <snip>

But a warship SHOULD. We not talking about computer designs which trade power and capability for volume and cost, we're talking about full fledged computer networks. Warships are the size of office towers, and we're talking about computer networks commensurate.

Why should an Honorverse warship not worry about hacking? At missile range, sure, it would be difficult to do anything but an injection worm over the com system. But at energy range, every receiver (from the Com system to fire control) would be vulnerable to live intrusion. And how great would it be if you could just send a program and shut down the sidewalls - just for a second...

So either Hacking doesn't take place (and we know it does), or a Warship's systems are routinely hardened against it to make it impractical to even try.

Given the advantages of even a partial hack (like a Denial of Service attack making a computer system (Like CM firecontrol) just shutting down for awhile), it's unimaginable that this has not taken place/routinely takes place in Honorverse combat - heck, it might be an automatic role of the ECM systems that we have never seen succesfully work. And if so, systems have to be hardened against it, and have cofferdams between them protecting critical systems from intrusions.

Sure, there's attention paid to computer security ... but you can't separate everything and still have effective computer control capability, there has to be some measure of interconnectedness, and a lot of things are going to be mostly computer controlled and monitored, with humans watching out of tradition and 'just in case' the computers malfunction.
Remember what Harkness to the Tepes. Blowing the superdreadnoughts was probably an easier/simpler problem to solve.

And again, Foraker would have had all the time and reference materials she needed to circumvent the security measures, in addition to having cleared access all the way through most, if not all, of the externally oriented security.
Remember, her 'attack vector' was one that even a paranoid naval programmer would consider unlikely. After all, you worry about attacks from the enemy - not the fleet command staff, and one or more of their routine operation plan updates being used as the vector to insert the code to wait for a trigger signal that came from the fleet's flagship, over official fleet internal communication channels.
Foraker basically launched the ultimate insider attack.

Foraker essentially did the same sort of thing that the MAlign did when they used Honor's flag lieutenant to try to assassinate her on her flag bridge, only with software, and rather more successfully.

SWM wrote:It's sort of moot--we've already demonstrated that whatever Shannon did, it was not merely the equivalent of "wifi hacking". It was more like a Trojan horse which was installed by the StateSec people themselves, in routine operational files given to them by Shannon.

---------------------

Keep in mind that Shannon was watching "live" when Harkness' parting gift went off.

She and Tourville likely had a real good idea of what happened. I suspect that when Shannon eventually meets Harkness, she will thank him for the inspiration.

A tactical sim sends a routine command to the parked and tethered shuttle in the boat bay that (1) disables the shuttle's sensors -- no one else is watching the shuttle's sensors; (2) sim has shuttle light off its wedge since the disabled sensors say it is clear of all nearby ships.

Attack and accomplish the main objective through a secondary (unguarded) system.

-- Stewart

stewart wrote:

SWM wrote:It's sort of moot--we've already demonstrated that whatever Shannon did, it was not merely the equivalent of "wifi hacking". It was more like a Trojan horse which was installed by the StateSec people themselves, in routine operational files given to them by Shannon.

---------------------

Keep in mind that Shannon was watching "live" when Harkness' parting gift went off.

She and Tourville likely had a real good idea of what happened. I suspect that when Shannon eventually meets Harkness, she will thank him for the inspiration.

A tactical sim sends a routine command to the parked and tethered shuttle in the boat bay that (1) disables the shuttle's sensors -- no one else is watching the shuttle's sensors; (2) sim has shuttle light off its wedge since the disabled sensors say it is clear of all nearby ships.

Attack and accomplish the main objective through a secondary (unguarded) system.

-- Stewart

Nope. Small craft have physical safety interlocks - Harkness's plan required physical access and modifications to be made first.

Kytheros wrote:

stewart wrote:Keep in mind that Shannon was watching "live" when Harkness' parting gift went off.

She and Tourville likely had a real good idea of what happened. I suspect that when Shannon eventually meets Harkness, she will thank him for the inspiration.

A tactical sim sends a routine command to the parked and tethered shuttle in the boat bay that (1) disables the shuttle's sensors -- no one else is watching the shuttle's sensors; (2) sim has shuttle light off its wedge since the disabled sensors say it is clear of all nearby ships.

Attack and accomplish the main objective through a secondary (unguarded) system.

-- Stewart

Nope. Small craft have physical safety interlocks - Harkness's plan required physical access and modifications to be made first.

I figured she may have had none-too-knowledgeable technicians disable those - or perhaps slightly cannier techs replace working components with carefully compromised ones - per automated work orders weeks before.

All computer systems have low level commands that perform basic functions, i.e "read" the data in location A, store it in "memory", copy it into location B. A lot of computer actions are talked about from an anthropomorphic viewpoint to help humans understand what is going on. Computers don't really read, write or remember anything and they certainly don't understand what is going on. They just react to "commands" and open or close switches controlling a flow of electrons, 1 or 0 state, just like flipping a light switch on or off.

Computer security systems, such as logonid and password, are built at higher levels to prevent unauthorized users from accessing low level commands. There are likely several layers of security for sensitive systems to compartmentalize and track even authorized users and prevent them from performing some actions. The essence of hacking is to bypass these security safeguards and get access to the lowest possible level of commands so you can control the basic actions of a computer system such as turn off containment fields or turn on a pinnaces wedge.

Shannon Forraker probably already had access to the system as an authorized user so all she had to do was expand her user id to have unlimited access or create a new id like Joe Hacker, Chief Engineer that did have authorization for actions that could destroy a ship. She could have done this over a period of time while she helped StateSec solve their software problems and update their software so she became a trusted person. SS probably had enough institutional arrogance to think it impossible that a mere Naval tech weenie would dare to try to hack their systems and enough ignorance of what Shannon was actually doing that they were just happy to have a computer glitch fixed and their boss off their back and they didn't look too closely at her code.

Or Shannon just knew the system so well that she was able to access it directly to plant logic bombs and give herself low level access,even remotely, to access the commands to destroy a ship. I don't find this at all implausible.

There is usually a requirement to prove that you cannot do certain things when building military hardware. Having your ships blow up due to your system is considered highly bad. Which is why fuzes use multiple events needed to activate. So making an artillery round go off requires that you accelerate it at many thousands of gravities and spin it really fast while it is accelerating, then you need to stop accelerating it and it needs to spin at least x hundreds of times before it unblocks the path needed to the detonator.

And yes, this does result in a few percent of duds. That is unfortunate, but acceptable compared to any possibility of an in-bore explosion.

I just did a high speed re-read of all the books in the Honor Harrington series and don't think that there is a specific answer in the text, however I believe that Shannon downloaded macros that caused a self destruct to occur in all the SS ships in the system in anticipation of the order to arrest the men and women that were thought to be successors to Esther McQueen. Anyway, when the order came through to place themselves into the SS hands, Shannon turns to her 'work station' and starts to enter some data then the SS ships explode and she said the now famous "OOPS".
Remember she was on the admirals staff and had any number of reasons to be sending files to the computers since the cease fire went into effect.

While it is true that she watched as Honor made her escape from and elimination of Cordelia, not sure if she would have known how Harkness pulled it off

Not sure (at this moment) if I have that book on my Kindle of if I borrowed the book from local library. As I said, I read them all in quick order <about 6-8 weeks total time elapsed from when I decided to undertake the reading> while waiting to get my ordered and paid for copy of the next installment of the Safehold series; some of the details are merged together. Unfortunately, for me, I went through them to quickly and finished this morning.

Hope this helps

Charlie

Fox2! wrote:This question may have already been asked and answered. In which case I'll go back to the more Middie preoccupation with finding this term's back door into the Crusher's database.

What did Shannon Forraker do to cause several squadrons of SS SDs to go boom? Fire on each other? Bring a pinnace's wedge up in the boat bay? Drop containment on a reactor? Set off a warhead in the magazine? Some other devilish misapplication (for which we are thankful) of her TAC witchery? Inquiring minds want to know.