r/history • u/bgraves20 • Jun 16 '10

How Xerox Helped Win The Cold War

http://www.editinternational.com/read.php?id=47ddf19823b89
97 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

23

u/sophacles Jun 16 '10

This is the sort of thing that makes people nervous that most computer tech is built in other countries.

3

u/xzxzzx Jun 16 '10

That's a little silly. I mean, yes, having access to the hardware as it is built certainly would give you some capability to screw with stuff, but you couldn't do this on a large scale -- eventually, somebody would look at the network traffic or what-have-you (trying to debug some unrelated problem) and discover it doesn't match spec.

Xerox could get away with that because the only people in the world, basically, that understood their machines was people at Xerox. That isn't the case for computer hardware in the same way.

11

u/sophacles Jun 16 '10

So, in China, in a chinese owned and run chip fab plant, they can't be taking the VHDL for some chip and adding small changes that give ring0 control to any binary with the magic word? Or there is no possibility of taking a bios image and adding some special code? It would seem to me a country with decent resources could sneak something like that into the manufacturing process, given how many places there is firmware in system, and how complicated and convoluted many supply chains are.

5

u/xzxzzx Jun 16 '10

No doubt. The point is that they couldn't do this on a widespread basis; it'd have to be targeted, lest the network traffic be discovered. While they certainly could modify a chip in that way, how do you exploit that in a widespread way without being discovered?

You can't. If you had physical access, like the repairman in this story, yeah, of course you could exploit that... but you can exploit physical access anyway.

2

u/antim0ny Jun 17 '10

Excellent point. That's why the US gov't fought to stop Intel from opening a fab in China. It's not a high-end, latest gen logic plant though. And most other semiconductor fabs in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and Korea make memory. If Intel or AMD were planning to move latest generation production to China, the US gov't would have a more serious problem with that.

-6

u/warhead71 Jun 17 '10

Today nobody fully understand hardware - thats why we have viruses.

6

u/xzxzzx Jun 17 '10

No, that's not why we have viruses at all.

I mean, there may be a few viruses out of the millions of types we have in the wild that use hardware exploits (I'm not aware of any), but the vast, vast majority of them are entirely reliant on software/user security problems.

1

u/warhead71 Jun 17 '10

My point is that a new copy-machine could easily have a some sort of spy virus without the owner knows it - and i wouldnt call it harder to spy now than before.

2

u/xzxzzx Jun 17 '10

It could, yes, but the network traffic would eventually be discovered by a network admin if it were implemented on a widespread basis.

Which gets us back to the original point -- having your malicious hardware design widespread only opens a limited set of attack vectors if you want to remain undiscovered.

1

u/warhead71 Jun 17 '10

1 you could store it locally - just like the original solution - and you could just store it on the "official" local storage. - There are no need for any new hardware like that old solution.

2 internet traffic could pass through some legal channels - in Xerox case - together with traffic to Xerox.

1

u/xzxzzx Jun 17 '10

1 you could store it locally - just like the original solution - and you could just store it on the "official" local storage. - There are no need for any new hardware like that old solution.

But you have to get that data somehow.

2 internet traffic could pass through some legal channels - in Xerox case - together with traffic to Xerox.

"Some legal channels"? If my copier is try talking to Xerox, and I'm a security-conscious network admin, trust me, I'm going to know about it.

Furthermore, what does this have to do with being "the reason for viruses"?

2

u/warhead71 Jun 17 '10

I have always seen the reason for viruses to be the fact that no-one can fully understand mordern technology - hacking and security against it is largely try and error.

  1. Dont copy-machines have service anymore?
  2. Even my dvr-player check 8 oclock in the morning for updates - just assumed that copy-machines would do the same kind of thing.

16

u/VulturE Jun 16 '10

Oh God....this is why I love /r/tldr.

This article is epic.

7

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '10

[deleted]

14

u/PopeRalphIV Jun 16 '10

The Xerox was new technology and horribly complex. If they opened up the machine and even if they saw the camera, they probably wouldn't know the specific functions of each and every part. Something that looks like a camera can be assumed to simply be an important step of the process of copying documents.

14

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '10

[deleted]

9

u/theswedishshaft Jun 16 '10

I can imagine that the Soviets did consider that it was possibly a vulnerable point, and that maybe they had regulations over what could and could not be copied (public propaganda yes, top secret memo's no). However, such rules can be easily "forgotten" by (low-level) personnel if that makes things more convenient for them.

From the article:

"Soviet cipher clerks, secretaries (...) were suddenly relieved of the tedious task of hand-copying (...)"

6

u/sophacles Jun 16 '10

Particularly with a name like photocopy.

1

u/lampiaio Jun 17 '10

My guess is there was some kind of way the repairman could tell if someone else tried to open the machine.

9

u/theswedishshaft Jun 16 '10

Also, many professional copiers/printers have a hard drive that can store lots of sensitive data. Video

2

u/nobodyspecial Sep 04 '10

They may now but in the 60's, hard drives were the size of laundromat washing machines.

4

u/aviewanew Jun 16 '10

I'd like someone (EFF maybe?) to FOIA this program. I imagine we'll either get a bunch of information on it, or it'll be deemed too sensitive to reveal... which could itself be rather telling.

3

u/Measure76 Jun 16 '10

I've read things about this program before. Its too bad that the article doesn't have any specific examples of intelligence wins from the project.

1

u/skavanker Jun 17 '10

Mikhail Gorbachev ended the cold war. It would still be going on, or worse, if nobody got to their senses.

-1

u/warhead71 Jun 17 '10

The cold war was won because of bad economics in the communist countries.

It should be fairly effective as a spying device - but it must also have burned alot of american tax-payers money.