Greg,

My mistake - I didn't intend to ask about the safety-of-flight kit, but
the mass-market commercial kit such as used dirtside.

Alex

On 18/1/23 13:24, Greg Nokes - greg at nokes.name (via tml list) wrote:
> Yeah, it was a little flippant, but here is more fleshed out reasoning:
>
> With systems designed to be operated for weeks, months, or even years with out updates there must be much different underlying architectural considerations. Could you imagine how valuable a remote zero day would be if discovered by an aggressor state? Could you imagine a starship’s computer blue screening just as it jumped? Oof.
>
> Quite honestly, IMHO that’s what lead to Virus - a fully AI, self modifying (program? Being? Something else?) crushed the Imperium. It had to be a dooozy to overcome the design and safely protocols, and IMHO may not even be physically possible.
>
> I would expect systems to operate in far different modes than we are accustomed to. Given that the smartest folks in the Terran, 2I and 3I have had a long time to think about this, I cannot really imagine what those safeguards would look like. Given what we know now, I would expect things like
>
> * Air gaps between sensor, commo, and control systems
> * Physically controlled one way data gates
> * triplicate unconnected consensus  based systems ( because everything on a ship is triplicate, right?)
> * Hardware systems with read only underlying OS’s
> * Some pretty intense crypto (and the real crypto, not NFT’s 🤣)
> * Using that intense crypto to sign everything to insure that there is no tampering
> * Only allowing sanitized messages between systems.
> * Neural Network based firewalls.
>
> Since we are borderline TL8, and have had networks for what, 50 years-ish, I really feel that what we are seeing now is a combination of stuff that was not build to be hyperconnected and an immature industry. Up and coming languages like Rust hinting at what a truly secure environment could be like.
>
> The 3I has has space flight longer than we have had fire. I have a feeling they will have figured stuff out.
--