Zero Day

Description

Vinay Gupta:

"The most important thing that the British War Office learned about cryptography was how to keep a secret: Enigma was broken at Bletchley Park early enough in World War II to change the course of the war—and of history. Now here's the thing: only if the breakthrough (called Ultra, which gives you a sense of its importance) was secret could Enigma's compromise be used to defeat the Nazis. Breaking Enigma was literally the "zero-day" that brought down an empire. Zero-day is a bug known only to an attacker. Defenders (those creating/protecting the software) have never seen the exploit and are, therefore, largely powerless to respond until they have done analysis. The longer the zero-day is kept secret, and its use undiscovered, the longer it represents absolute power.

Like any modern zero-day sold on the black market, the Enigma compromise had value only if it remained secret. The stakes were higher, but the basic template of the game—secret compromise, secret exploitation, doom on discovery—continues to be one basic form of the computer security game to this day. The allies went to extraordinary lengths to conceal their compromise of the Enigma, including traps like Operation Mincemeat (planting false papers on a corpse masquerading as a drowned British military officer). The Snowden revelations and other work has revealed the degree to which this game continues, with many millions of taxpayer dollars being spent keeping illicit access to software compromises available to the NSA, GCHQ and all the rest. The first rule is not to reveal success in breaking your enemy's security by careless action; the compromise efforts that Snowden revealed had, after all, been running for many years before the public became aware of them." (http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/machine-keeping-secrets)