Nuclear Plants Cautiously Phase Out Dial-Up Modems | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear Plants Cautiously Phase Out Dial-Up Modems

wired.com

28 pointsjwb11913 comments

From the article: “The use of modems inherently introduces cyber security vulnerabilities to the systems to which they are attached.”

I disagree. In a modem-to-modem connection, the system is as secure as the underlying physical infrastructure. If those phone lines are secure, so is the data being transmitted on them. And the government does have guaranteed secure phone lines between strategic bases.

The minute you move from analog-based communication to digital, it is then that you "inherently introduce" vulnerabilities to the system. Between the undetected buffer overflows, the sheer pervasiveness of digital interception/intrusion tools, and the dificulties in keeping data confined in a digital network; I'd say VPN systems are at least an order of magnitude more likely to be cracked than a modem-modem connection over secure phone lines.

A "secure phone line" is a line with compatible encryption hardware on either end. The physical line itself is no more secure than any other. In any event, there is no indication that ERDS has been using secure lines.

and if those phone numbers were ever published it would be trivial to busy signal them to death.

Analog DoS attack?

the sheer pervasiveness of digital interception/intrusion tools

Are you claiming that given physical access to the transport medium digital communication is easier to intercept than analog?

I seriously thought this was a The Onion article based on the title. Gotta love incredibly dangerous things running on antiquated hardware.

Antiquated == "Well Tested" in many cases. They don't run stuff like the space shuttle on the very latest AMD chips, for instance.

Indeed. A few fighter jets still run on vacuum tubes, I believe.

That's nothing - there are a few Chinese jets left that have a little guy with an abacus crouched in the nose.

[ Sorry, couldn't resist, I liked the mental image too much. ]

There's an Asimov story about that too.

In fact, the Hubble ran on 486 chips at late as last year. Not sure if this last mission upgraded the hardware or not. I believe that the reasoning behind it was that that chipset was more resistant to failure induced by radiation than new hardware, or at least the effects and failure modes where more understood with the older chip. Much less of an x factor.

They should use a muon based communication system. I hear they get 100 bits per second or something. Security by infeasibility.

Nah, use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

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