Wire Pirates

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Term Paper Title	Wire Pirates
# of Words	1044
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.18

Wire Pirates

Wire Pirates

Someday the Internet may become an information superhighway, but right now it is
more like a 19th-century railroad that passes through the badlands of the Old
West. As waves of new settlers flock to cyberspace in search for free
information or commercial opportunity, they make easy marks for sharpers who
play a keyboard as deftly as Billy the Kid ever drew a six-gun.

It is difficult even for those who ply it every day to appreciate how much the
Internet depends on collegial trust and mutual forbearance. The 30,000
interconnected computer networks and 2.5 million or more attached computers that
make up the system swap gigabytes of information based on nothing more than a
digital handshake with a stranger.

Electronic impersonators can commit slander or solicit criminal acts in someone
else's name; they can even masquerade as a trusted colleague to convince someone
to reveal sensitive personal or business information.

"It's like the Wild West", says Donn B. Parker of SRI: "No laws, rapid growth
and enterprise - it's shoot first or be killed."

To understand how the Internet, on which so many base their hopes for education,
profit and international competitiveness, came to this pass, it can be
instructive to look at the security record of other parts of the international
communications infrastructure.

The first, biggest error that designers seem to repeat is adoption of the
"security through obscurity" strategy. Time and again, attempts to keep a system
safe by keeping its vulnerabilities secret have failed.

Consider, for example, the running war between AT&T and the phone phreaks. When
hostilities began in the 1960s, phreaks could manipulate with relative ease the
long-distance network in order to make unpaid telephone calls by playing certain
tones into the receiver. One phreak, John Draper, was known as "Captain Crunch"
for his discovery that a modified cereal-box whistle could make the 2,600-hertz
tone required to unlock a trunk line.

The next generation of security were the telephone credit cards. When the cards
were first introduced, credit card consisted of a sequence of digits (usually
area code, number and billing office code) followed by a "check digit" that
depended on the other digits. Operators could easily perform the math to
determine whether a particular credit-card number was valid. But also phreaks
could easily figure out how to generate the proper check digit for any given
telephone number.

So in 1982 AT&T...

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