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Malware Encoded in DNA Can Hack Gene-Sequencing Software
- cowpatcallr 9y agoA friend showed me that one of those NCIS crime shows already did this. https://www.themarysue.com/malware-uploaded-from-bone-bones/ https://www.themarysue.com/malware-uploaded-from-bone-bones/ Malware is 3d printed on to a bone they scan in or something. Reality imitating art I guess. What a world we live in.
- microcolonel 9y ago> we see a character’s computer burst into flames If we can just get malware that can prompt a personal computer to burst into flames.
- NegativeLatency 9y agoYou could hop from the PC to something like a PLC and sabotage an industrial process (like stuxnet)
- stephengillie 9y agoWith thermal throttling, simply stopping the fans and running processors at 100% may not be enough to HCF anymore.
- nayuki 9y agoThe infamous old video from Tom's Hardware Guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxNUK3U73SI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxNUK3U73SI "What happens when the CPU cooler is removed?"
- njbooher 9y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Ne...
- djsumdog 9y agoOr the Season 3 primer of Rick and Morty where Rick invents a fictional backstory with the secret the federation was looking for replaced with exploit code.
- nthcolumn 9y agoI wanna be fuzzed by you, just you and nobody else but you.
- nthcolumn 9y agoTechnically this might be accurate? Someone could in theory naturally have a specific sequence in their DNA which could cause the same effect. Fuzzing is... oh never mind.
- patrickg_zill 9y agoThis reminds me of the William Gibson short story, "New Rose Hotel", for some reason.
- mycall 9y agoI miss cyberspace. So much potential.
- andyjohnson0 9y ago"The diskette in my hand. Rain on the river. I knew, but I couldn't face it. I put the code for that meningial virus back into your purse and lay down beside you. So Moenner died, along with other Hosaka researchers. Including Hiroshi. Chedanne suffered permanent brain damage. Hiroshi hadn't worried about contamination. The proteins he punched for were harmless. So the synthesizer hummed to itself all night long building a virus to the specifications of Maas Biolabs GmbH. Maas. Small, fast, ruthless -- All Edge." Written in 1981.
- m3kw9 9y agoMust be the software detecting certain patterns to trigger certain functions. Fake the sequence of patterns and you can control some outcomes.
- maxton 9y ago> "Rather than exploit an existing vulnerability in the fqzcomp program, as real-world hackers do, they modified the program's open-source code to insert their own flaw allowing the buffer overflow." So really, this is not as interesting as the headline would have you believe. Storing data in DNA is nothing new, and these researchers are just using it as input to a program that was deliberately written to improperly handle that data.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 9y agoThe concept itself is interesting in its own right and this is still a very innovative proof of concept that combines techniques from biochemistry and computer security. One of the interesting insights to come out of this is that to ensure a higher probability that the sequencer reads the code correctly, it should be a palindrome.
- omarforgotpwd 9y agoWhats interesting is just the idea that you should sanitize ALL inputs, no matter how unlikely it is that the input could be malicious.
- taeric 9y agoThough, really, is that interesting? Yes, you should treat all input data as data no matter where it came from. And you should have checks in place to reject any data that is out of size/whatever constraints for your software. And for the love of secure software, never blindly execute code from a serialized source without damned good reasons for thinking that source is safe.
- icelancer 9y ago>Though, really, is that interesting? Yes. Trusting human DNA is something that WILL absolutely, 100%, no-doubt-about it happen in the future and you will hear about it. People are good at finding ways to screw things up.
- maxerickson 9y agoSmall earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14979120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14979120
- sjg007 9y agoNeat. Future bio hackers.
- null0pointer 9y agoSanitise your inputs!
- IIAOPSW 9y agoI assume the lab was sanitized before extracting the DNA.
- cmurf 9y agoI have sent her dessert, a very special dessert. I wrote it myself. It starts so simply...
- krisives 9y agoClickbait joke based on that stupid show
- Andrenid 9y agoLittle Bobby Tables grew up...
- Mizza 9y ago(As I previously contacted the authors about) - this attack has already been demonstrated by a very influential VXer, Second Path To Hell, in the 4th issue of the Valhalla zine: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PoFK8ufxMiIJ:vxheaven.org/lib/vsp48.html+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PoFK8uf... Cool to see it getting academic "recognition" though!
- caf 9y agoIt makes me wonder if you could create a physical scene that, when photographed by a digital camera, exploited the camera.
- quxs 9y agoNot a digital camera, but I had once written some poor vision processing code that would segfault when it recognized a certain pattern. It was interesting to think about, that I could break my program by showing it a pciture.
- EvilTerran 9y agoI'm reminded of David Langford's "basilisks": http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm [edit] more in the series: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of-darkness/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of...
- number6 9y agoOr a kind of message or language that when seen by a human or processed by a brain can crash or exploit it ... It's also the plot of a good book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
- captainmuon 9y agoYou can use adversarial neural networks to make a special picture that looks like noise or junk, but a certain neural network will recognize e.g. a dog in it. You basically train the ANN to make something that the other NN classifies as dog, but humans don't. I often wonder if you could do that with humans. I don't think you can crash a human brain a la Snow Crash or Basilisk, but I think it is plausible to craft an abstract picture that creates fear, arousal, or some other "primitive" response.
- digikata 9y ago> but I think it is plausible to craft an abstract picture that creates fear, arousal, or some other "primitive" response. Visit a modern art museum - I think one can find many examples.
- vectorEQ 9y agoretarded useless research. Just the same principles as any exploit on an arbitrary interface. Just ask yourself, who would build a dns sequencying laboratory and be able to sequence dna would want to hack a dna sequencing lab.... obviously they already know how it works.... can't they spend some time on researching a solution to an actual problem?
- honestoHeminway 9y agoGetting out of alimoney - getting creative. A manual for the rich.
- bartwe 9y agoStop writing stuff in c, a language without even the basics of range checked arrays, actual strings, lists and other collection types.
- paulddraper 9y agoMalware Encoded in DNA...a virus, so to speak :D
- andyjohnson0 9y ago1. Gene sequence injects malware to take control of DNA sequencer. 2. Compromised sequencer searches local network for DNA synthesisers. 3. Malware modifies synthesiser software to insert novel retrovirus into output DNA. 3. Wait for DNA to be executed inside a cell. Stuxnet for DNA.
- rgejman 9y agothis is the plot of a sci-fi novel waiting to happen.
- appearsonline 9y agoChange Agent by Daniel Suarez is somewhat close: In 2045 Interpol's Genetic Crime Division grapples with a new type of crime: illicit genetic editing -- and it isn't long before the fight gets personal.
- throwaway91111 9y agoWhile this is cool, it just seems like a clunky version of an actual virus.
- mylons 9y agolol, this is such a bad article -- and kind of a stupid experiment. nobody is arbitrarily executing pieces of dna as code in a computer.
- empath75 9y agoit was a simulated buffer overflow, they weren't just executing DNA sequences.