The Hacker Crackdown Part 7

Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times, you become quite good at it. In fact you're plugging, and connecting, and disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords at a time. It's a manual handicraft, really, quite satisfying in a way, rather like weaving on an upright loom.

Should a long-distance call come up, it would be different, but not all that different. Instead of connecting the call through your own local switchboard, you have to go up the hierarchy, onto the long-distance lines, known as "trunklines."

Depending on how far the call goes, it may have to work its way through a whole series of operators, which can take quite a while. The caller doesn't wait on the line while this complex process is negotiated across the country by the gaggle of operators. Instead, the caller hangs up, and you call him back yourself when the call has finally worked its way through.

After four or five years of this work, you get married, and you have to quit your job, this being the natural order of womanhood in the American 1920s. The phone company has to train somebody else--maybe two people, since the phone system has grown somewhat in the meantime.

And this costs money.

In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching system is a very expensive proposition. Eight thousand Leticia Luthors would be bad enough, but a quarter of a million of them is a military-scale proposition and makes drastic measures in automation financially worthwhile.

Although the phone system continues to grow today, the number of human beings employed by telcos has been dropping steadily for years. Phone "operators"

now deal with nothing but unusual contingencies, all routine operations having been shrugged off onto machines.

Consequently, telephone operators are considerably less machine-like nowadays, and have been known to have accents and actual character in their voices. When you reach a human operator today, the operators are rather more "human" than they were in Leticia's day--but on the other hand, human beings in the phone system are much harder to reach in the first place.

Over the first half of the twentieth century, "electromechanical" switching systems of growing complexity were cautiously introduced into the phone system.

In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid systems are still in use. But after 1965, the phone system began to go completely electronic, and this is by far the dominant mode today.

Electromechanical systems have "crossbars," and "brushes,"

and other large moving mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than Leticia, are still slow, and tend to wear out fairly quickly.

But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon chips, and are lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite durable.

They are much cheaper to maintain than even the best electromechanical systems, and they fit into half the s.p.a.ce.

And with every year, the silicon chip grows smaller, faster, and cheaper yet. Best of all, automated electronics work around the clock and don't have salaries or health insurance.

There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the use of computer-chips. When they do break down, it is a daunting challenge to figure out what the heck has gone wrong with them. A broken cordboard generally had a problem in it big enough to see. A broken chip has invisible, microscopic faults. And the faults in bad software can be so subtle as to be practically theological.

If you want a mechanical system to do something new, then you must travel to where it is, and pull pieces out of it, and wire in new pieces. This costs money. However, if you want a chip to do something new, all you have to do is change its software, which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap. You don't even have to see the chip to change its program. Even if you did see the chip, it wouldn't look like much. A chip with program X doesn't look one whit different from a chip with program Y.

With the proper codes and sequences, and access to specialized phone-lines, you can change electronic switching systems all over America from anywhere you please.

And so can other people. If they know how, and if they want to, they can sneak into a microchip via the special phonelines and diddle with it, leaving no physical trace at all. If they broke into the operator's station and held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious. If they broke into a telco building and went after an electromechanical switch with a toolbelt, that would at least leave many traces. But people can do all manner of amazing things to computer switches just by typing on a keyboard, and keyboards are everywhere today. The extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark, broad, almost mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life about any computer on a network.

Security experts over the past twenty years have insisted, with growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability of computers represents an entirely new level of risk, of unknown but obviously dire potential to society. And they are right.

An electronic switching station does pretty much everything Let.i.tia did, except in nanoseconds and on a much larger scale. Compared to Miss Luthor's ten thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching computer, 60s vintage, has a 128,000 lines. And the current AT&T system of choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.

An Electronic Switching Station can scan every line on its "board"

in a tenth of a second, and it does this over and over, tirelessly, around the clock. Instead of eyes, it uses "ferrod scanners"

to check the condition of local lines and trunks. Instead of hands, it has "signal distributors," "central pulse distributors,"

"magnetic latching relays," and "reed switches," which complete and break the calls. Instead of a brain, it has a "central processor."

Instead of an instruction manual, it has a program. Instead of a handwritten logbook for recording and billing calls, it has magnetic tapes. And it never has to talk to anybody.

Everything a customer might say to it is done by punching the direct-dial tone b.u.t.tons on your subset.

Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it does need an interface, some way to relate to its, er, employers. This interface is known as the "master control center." (This interface might be better known simply as "the interface," since it doesn't actually "control" phone calls directly. However, a term like "Master Control Center" is just the kind of rhetoric that telco maintenance engineers--and hackers--find particularly satisfying.)

Using the master control center, a phone engineer can test local and trunk lines for malfunctions. He (rarely she) can check various alarm displays, measure traffic on the lines, examine the records of telephone usage and the charges for those calls, and change the programming.

And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master control center by remote control can also do these things, if he (rarely she) has managed to figure them out, or, more likely, has somehow swiped the knowledge from people who already know.

In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth, which felt particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2 million on computer security. Some think it spent as much as two million, if you count all the a.s.sociated costs.

Two million dollars is still very little compared to the great cost-saving utility of telephonic computer systems.

Unfortunately, computers are also stupid.

Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.

In the 1960s, in the first shocks of spreading computerization, there was much easy talk about the stupidity of computers-- how they could "only follow the program" and were rigidly required to do "only what they were told." There has been rather less talk about the stupidity of computers since they began to achieve grandmaster status in chess tournaments, and to manifest many other impressive forms of apparent cleverness.

Nevertheless, computers STILL are profoundly brittle and stupid; they are simply vastly more subtle in their stupidity and brittleness.

The computers of the 1990s are much more reliable in their components than earlier computer systems, but they are also called upon to do far more complex things, under far more challenging conditions.

On a basic mathematical level, every single line of a software program offers a chance for some possible screwup.

Software does not sit still when it works; it "runs,"

it interacts with itself and with its own inputs and outputs.

By a.n.a.logy, it stretches like putty into millions of possible shapes and conditions, so many shapes that they can never all be successfully tested, not even in the lifespan of the universe.

Sometimes the putty snaps.

The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that human society is used to thinking about. Software is something like a machine, and something like mathematics, and something like language, and something like thought, and art, and information. . . . But software is not in fact any of those other things. The protean quality of software is one of the great sources of its fascination.

It also makes software very powerful, very subtle, very unpredictable, and very risky.

Some software is bad and buggy. Some is "robust,"

even "bulletproof." The best software is that which has been tested by thousands of users under thousands of different conditions, over years. It is then known as "stable." This does NOT mean that the software is now flawless, free of bugs. It generally means that there are plenty of bugs in it, but the bugs are well-identified and fairly well understood.

There is simply no way to a.s.sure that software is free of flaws. Though software is mathematical in nature, it cannot by "proven" like a mathematical theorem; software is more like language, with inherent ambiguities, with different definitions, different a.s.sumptions, different levels of meaning that can conflict.

Human beings can manage, more or less, with human language because we can catch the gist of it.

Computers, despite years of effort in "artificial intelligence,"

have proven spectacularly bad in "catching the gist" of anything at all.

The tiniest bit of semantic grit may still bring the mightiest computer tumbling down. One of the most hazardous things you can do to a computer program is try to improve it--to try to make it safer.

Software "patches" represent new, untried un-"stable" software, which is by definition riskier.

The modern telephone system has come to depend, utterly and irretrievably, upon software. And the System Crash of January 15, 1990, was caused by an IMPROVEMENT in software. Or rather, an ATTEMPTED improvement.

As it happened, the problem itself--the problem per se--took this form.

A piece of telco software had been written in C language, a standard language of the telco field. Within the C software was a long "do. . .while" construct. The "do. . .while" construct contained a "switch" statement. The "switch" statement contained an "if" clause. The "if" clause contained a "break." The "break"

was SUPPOSED to "break" the "if clause." Instead, the "break"

broke the "switch" statement.

That was the problem, the actual reason why people picking up phones on January 15, 1990, could not talk to one another.

Or at least, that was the subtle, abstract, cyberspatial seed of the problem. This is how the problem manifested itself from the realm of programming into the realm of real life.

The System 7 software for AT&T's 4ESS switching station, the "Generic 44E14 Central Office Switch Software,"

had been extensively tested, and was considered very stable.

By the end of 1989, eighty of AT&T's switching systems nationwide had been programmed with the new software. Cautiously, thirty-four stations were left to run the slower, less-capable System 6, because AT&T suspected there might be shakedown problems with the new and unprecedently sophisticated System 7 network.

The stations with System 7 were programmed to switch over to a backup net in case of any problems. In mid-December 1989, however, a new high-velocity, high-security software patch was distributed to each of the 4ESS switches that would enable them to switch over even more quickly, making the System 7 network that much more secure.

Unfortunately, every one of these 4ESS switches was now in possession of a small but deadly flaw.

In order to maintain the network, switches must monitor the condition of other switches--whether they are up and running, whether they have temporarily shut down, whether they are overloaded and in need of a.s.sistance, and so forth. The new software helped control this bookkeeping function by monitoring the status calls from other switches.