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Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet

279 points by dd23

by codezero

6 subcomments

My favorite part of this was:
That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments
—
The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s. The code ran perfectly well thanks to modern optimizing compilers and having moved from Vax to Linux in the 90s, it was a surprisingly seamless transition.
It reminds me of a conference talk I’ve referenced before “do over or make due” basically implying rewriting large amounts of mostly functioning code was not worth the effort if it could be taped together with modern tools.

by PoignardAzur

0 subcomment

That article is sobering. The fact that this malware stayed under the radar for 20 years is pretty ominous in itself.

by ronin_niron

0 subcomment

IEEE-754 only mandates correct rounding for +-*/ and sqrt. Transcendentals (sin/cos/exp/log/pow) are explicitly allowed to vary in the last few ULPs, and glibc, musl, MSVC, and Intel SVML all do. PID is just basic ops, so libm divergence doesn't hit there, but motor vector control or sensor linearization touches these functions every cycle and small disagreements compound. Two firmware revisions can have zero source diff and still drift in production. The only thing that changed was the linked libm. It actually shows up in Payne-Hanek argument reduction and at the worst table-maker's-dilemma boundaries. Probably why safety-critical guidance pins a specific libm build instead of just "IEEE-754 compliant".

by hnthrowaway0315

1 subcomments

Download link for anyone who is curious enough:
https://bazaar.abuse.ch/sample/9a10e1faa86a5d39417cae44da5ad...
I'll probably build a Windows XP VM first.

by tiagod

0 subcomment

This is an amazing find. I'm very curious regarding the specific targets of these rules, and in the exact changes to the results. Wonder if they will only make a difference in simulated conditions super specific to nuclear reactors?

by Lihh27

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heh the key move is the worm. you can't catch it by checking on a second box because there is no clean box.

by trebligdivad

1 subcomments

Haha it's a fun finding though; The source control comment feels a little off; I'm sure there were SCCS (hmm or did cvs use similar?) still around at that time.

0 subcomment

by kittikitti

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Thank you for sharing this. I was recently pushing the limits of precision computing and this illuminated a part of my research. It built on top of largely government funded research, where I found a surprising dearth of available precision frameworks with verification. Perhaps national security interests, as elucidated by the original poster, discourages transparency of methods for arbitrary precision calculations.

by slim

8 subcomments

sabotaging science must be the most morally corrupt thing you can do as a civilisation

by Retr0id

7 subcomments

The submitted article appears to be an LLM summary of https://www.sentinelone.com/labs/fast16-mystery-shadowbroker...

by foreman_

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by _alphageek

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by jeremie_strand

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by aaron695

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by vasco

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So that's why China still can't make ballpoint pens? /s

by cawksuwcka

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by TranspectiveDev

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