[HN Gopher] Song from 1989 declared a cybersecurity vulnerabilit...
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Song from 1989 declared a cybersecurity vulnerability for crashing
hard drives
Author : quyleanh
Score : 113 points
Date : 2022-08-22 22:34 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techspot.com)
| ashton314 wrote:
| The vulnerability and the fix remind me of a chapter in _Godel,
| Escher Bach_ where Achilles gives the tortoise (or maybe the
| other way around) a record that, when played, destroys his record
| player. So fun to see that IRL.
| dmd wrote:
| I mentioned this when this was posted last week.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507898
| SilasX wrote:
| That actually illustrates why it's a bad analogy for
| communicating the concept: it's not intuitive at all why record
| player _could_ be destroyed by playing the right record -- most
| have volume limits that make this very difficult in practice,
| and most people never see one even getting close enough to see
| the dynamics that would cause it to happen.
|
| And so it definitely doesn't help communicate the broader idea
| that all formal systems (meeting some minimal criteria) should
| have a corresponding flaw.
|
| (I would have gone with a helicopter as the system but that
| would require domain familiarity.)
| bch wrote:
| > I would have gone with a helicopter as the system but that
| would require domain familiarity
|
| Would you give it a try?
| SilasX wrote:
| Well, there isn't much to add beyond the fact them being
| more prone to acoustic breakage. Helicopters are a
| nightmare for vibrations because you have to spin the rotor
| really fast and forcibly, risking over-stressing critical
| structural components if you excite them at their resonant
| frequency. They're designed to operate at only one rotor
| speed because that's enough of a headache in terms of
| preventing it from hitting resonant modes that the
| structure can't handle.
|
| So for helicopters it's much easier to imagine a pattern of
| rotor movement that will break the system -- though again,
| getting the intuition down would require having modeled
| vibratory systems to see when they go out of control.
|
| But at least it's more intuitive than record players, which
| work with much smaller vibrations and generally operate in
| moderate volume limits.
| viscanti wrote:
| I wonder why they didn't have Achilles give out a special
| rotor for a helicopter that would have caused the entire
| helicopter to break. It seems like a great analogy for
| people who have the required domain knowledge as well as
| think it would be reasonable for someone to gift someone
| else a helicopter rotor.
| schoen wrote:
| This reminds me of the Donald Duck cartoon in which for
| some reason some of the Duck family have acquired a steam
| calliope (kind of like a somewhat portable pipe organ),
| and are trying to figure out what to do with it.
| Whereupon they meet a strange hermit who lives in a cave,
| or something, and who says that he has absolutely
| everything he needs in life, and there is nothing they
| can offer him that would be of any value.
|
| Except for one thing.
|
| Of course, it turns out to be a steam calliope.
|
| Similarly, I suppose that, sometimes, when you really
| need a helicopter rotor, you _really_ need a helicopter
| rotor!
| hobs wrote:
| It does explain it in the book in a fairly tortured way - its
| a perfect record player than plays things perfectly and can
| play anything and that makes it vulnerable. A worse record
| player would not be vulnerable.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| The Tortoise gave the phonograph record to the Crab.
|
| (The Crab had a record player which was claimed to reproduce
| any sounds.)
| HPsquared wrote:
| Zip drives had something like this. A malfunctioning drive
| could damage the removable discs in such a way that they would
| then damage other drives they were inserted into, then the
| cycle repeats...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death#Iomega_Zip_dr...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The mechanism of damage is different. The faulty disks aren't
| vibrating the drive to death, the drive is head-banging[0].
| Iomega cost-reduced the drives to a fault; removing a tiny
| piece of foam that is there specifically so that head-banging
| _doesn 't damage the drive head_.
|
| Head-banging is an intentional feature on disk drives[1] to
| correct for read errors and get back to a known good state;
| so a corrupted disk would cause it to head-bang every time
| you tried to read from it. And since there was no cushioning
| on the drive rails each head-bang would misalign the drive...
| making it corrupt more disks!
|
| I'm not sure what the record player equivalent to this would
| even be. A very heavy stylus could damage the disc and carve
| into it, but there's no way you could have a disc permanently
| change the tracking weight of that stylus.
|
| [0] When a disk drive intentionally crashes its head against
| a mechanical limit to ensure position of that head in lieu of
| having an actual sensor
|
| [1] The most egregious case being the Apple ]['s 5 1/2"
| drives, which intentionally do this on _every power-up_.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I'm not sure what the record player equivalent to this
| would even be. A very heavy stylus could damage the disc
| and carve into it, but there's no way you could have a disc
| permanently change the tracking weight of that stylus.
|
| Conceptually, you could have a record made of "tar", which
| got scraped off onto the stylus and was then impossible to
| clean off.
| samstave wrote:
| OMG recall having a zip and 1 gig IOMEGA drive in your tower?
| and how cool you thought you were
| Bud wrote:
| I kinda always thought Zip was a kludge technology, and I
| thought I was way cooler because I used magneto-optical
| instead. (I kinda still do, because those discs are still
| working, 937 years later.)
| 1shooner wrote:
| Especially when that tower was a licensed mac clone
| SuperMac. I don't think our Jaz drives ever really worked.
| excalibur wrote:
| So if you stand in Times Square with a boombox and play this song
| at full volume, does that constitute a cyber attack?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I suppose in the same way throwing a USB stick full of malware
| at someone would be, yeah.
| Bud wrote:
| Disagree, I guess. Throwing a USB stick of malware at someone
| doesn't realistically serve the purpose of infecting their
| stuff with that malware. But playing this song in Times
| Square very much does have a realistic chance of breaking
| their hard drives, if said drives are old enough, etc.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I think it's actually more likely that someone will pick up
| a USB stick and infect themselves than they will be using a
| '88 5400 RPM hard drive in the vicinity close enough to be
| affected by the resonance.
| scohesc wrote:
| I'd consider it social engineering in this day and age.
|
| Who _wouldn't_ want to tell you all their encryption keys and
| passwords after listening to Janet Jackson? ;-)
| praptak wrote:
| There's a story (not confirmed) about a Black Team member using
| resonance to crash (physically) a tape cabinet:
| http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html
| causality0 wrote:
| I've been so disappointed in the reaction of tech sites to this
| story. It's a third-hand anecdote about an unspecified model of
| hard drive from fifteen years ago which might be complete
| bullshit but I'm seeing links to articles about it one or times a
| day for a straight week.
| jmbwell wrote:
| Of course, I'm reminded of Brendan Gregg shouting at hard drives:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
|
| Hard disk drives are not dissimilar from other high-precision
| acoustic systems. The actuator is even called a "voice coil."
|
| That we are able to transmit a range of frequencies with
| sufficient accuracy and precision to induce a magnet to move a
| near-microscopic coil of wire at the end of armature flying
| microns above the surface of a platter spinning at a rotational
| velocity of thousands of RPMs and a linear velocity of inches per
| millisecond, land at exact locations, and detect the polarity of
| a magnetic field... I can't even. I don't even know what to
| compare it to.
| cm2187 wrote:
| or Apple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5d151lqJsA&t=150s
| samstave wrote:
| We have a word for that.
|
| > _MAGICK_
| OedipusRex wrote:
| Last time someone posted this he showed up in the comments lol
| mmastrac wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32513240
| ideamotor wrote:
| Compare it to ... Havana syndrome?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| A lot of signal processing/information theory stuff crosses
| over pretty seamlessly between hard drives and radio
| transmission, too: https://www.schrankmonster.de/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/12/Scr...
|
| The presentation that (deleted) tweet screenshots:
| https://www.iaria.org/conferences2015/filesAICT15/AnIntroduc...
| zwieback wrote:
| I was setting up a trade show in Zurich when Janet Jackson was
| soundchecking Rhythm Nation in the next building. None of our
| hard drives crashed but that was in 88 or 89 so I guess maybe the
| vulnerability showed up much much later.
| anyfoo wrote:
| The live version may not have that exact frequency. Or the
| acoustics of the hall and the audio system may have acted as a
| filter at that frequency.
|
| But it might be more likely that the hard disks just weren't
| vulnerable, yeah. (5400rpm in '89, was that common?) Otherwise,
| if they did play the original song, then the loudness could
| have made the effect even worse.
| zwieback wrote:
| All true. What I remember was just how damn loud it was. We
| were quite a bit away and you could feel it in your bones.
| StingyJelly wrote:
| Has someone demonstrated this? It was immediately my favorite CVE
| but without poc and based on a single story I'm quite skeptical.
| shakna wrote:
| Whilst not precisely the same, you do have the famous
| "Screaming in the Data Centre" [0] from over a decade ago.
|
| [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
| elwell wrote:
| Ah yes, Janet Jackson's infamous 'hard drive malfunction'.
| z9znz wrote:
| > special malware that is able to encode the data to be
| transmitted through direct manipulation of the fan speed
|
| So in addition to being more pleasant to use, fanless laptops
| (computers) are also more secure!
| neogodless wrote:
| Quite a few submissions on this recently.
|
| "Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32483211
|
| (This is based on the original Raymond Chen blog post.)
| gennarro wrote:
| Previously shared here, via the cve, which is a less interesting
| read of course.
|
| Link: https://exploit.report/cve/cve-2022-38392/
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| FTA, originally from
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/18/janet_jackson_video_c...
| anyfoo wrote:
| Yeah, link should probably be changed to that.
|
| I initially wondered why this is not just pointing to Raymond
| Chen's excellent blog (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthi
| ng/20220816-00/?p=10... ), which is also linked by both The
| Register and Techspot, but the The Register article adds that
| it's not officially a CVE.
| kuon wrote:
| I had the "vibration" problem a few times in me IT career, train,
| construction work and once elevators.
|
| It is the kind of issue that are really hard to diagnose the
| first time but after the first time it's part of the standard
| "diagnose suite".
|
| I love to show this video about the effect of noise on HDD (be
| sure to put the volume down)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
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(page generated 2022-08-24 23:01 UTC)