Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

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It's truly frightening to see logic used to justify use of floppy disks in nuke silos: reliability, "tried and true", no need for internet connection! None of these make any technical sense. This software likely is getting no real testing so all these assertions are pointless. The naive assumption that whatever built in 90s was bug-free, most reliable and most secure is completely baseless. It's almost guaranteed that the software possibly has many bugs and issues that wouldn't have been addressed without advances in tools and techniques such as TDD, ability to do massive exhaustive testing, ability to measure code coverage, better safety features in languages, fixes in standard libraries, patches in kernels, provable algorithms for multi-threading and so on. Just think about old flaky FAT disk format VS advanced far more reliable new disk formats. If you can develop new fighter planes, you can sure develop new control software that is at least as reliable as previous generation.

The systems are time-tested. How many accidental launches have happened so far? Zero. In my opinion that's the most important metric of these systems, as long as they are still credible threats otherwise.

Also, what could a better system improve? Slightly faster launches? Slightly more certain launches? I argue that those are not important -- the enemy won't fear the missiles more if they run off USB. But you might increase the chance of a false launch, and certainly incur large testing costs.

From a military point of view, the huge advantage of floppy disks is that they're dumb storage. The modern replacements such as USB storage or SD cards are microprocessor-based systems. How are you going to verify that the SD cards you're buying don't have malicious firmware?

Adding to that, 8 inch floppies have a certain quality to them that no younger medium has ever recreated: try hiding one on your body, try sneaking in an illicit reader to make "personal backups"... Security through unwieldyness goes a long way, when your biggest threats are of the social kind.

You most definitely don't want infected USB drives in your nuclear facility!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

That's a different issue. That's a file that makes certain systems misbehave. The drives are dumb storage.

When your storage device itself is smart and compromised, you can't even verify what its contents are. Things get much worse.

I imagine BadUSB would fall into that latter category

Uhmmmmm, read Eric Schlosser's "Command and Control". The US nuclear missiles had no protection against accidental lunch, you didn't even have to put in a code or a key, and the US government has said, sincerely, that "the US nuclear stockpile is completely safe, based on their observation that there was no accidental lunches yet".

If you have raw electrical cables sticking out of your wall, they are not "safe" just because you haven't electrocuted yourself yet.

"The systems are time-tested. How many accidental launches have happened so far? Zero. "

Hell, if that's your metric just unplug the thing. Exactly zero accidental launches, and you'll only have made the wrong decision once if anything goes wrong...

Well, we are unplugging them.

You should buy this talisman of mine that wards away tigers. You know it works since I've had it my entire life and I've yet to be attacked by a tiger!

> The naive assumption that whatever built in 90s was bug-free, most reliable and most secure is completely baseless.

It's based on the correct observation that after decades of use, we know how good and and how bad it is.

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