Defensive Malware and Ironic Outcomes of Military Research
In the past the military and the space agency NASA have spurred innovation in the public and business sectors with derived benefits from there research - take hand held calculators and the Internet for examples. Now the military is reversing that trend and following patterns started by malware developers.
Wired is reporting that the military is going well beyond the idea of a Pentagon controlled botnet to seek the ability to control any computer:
On Monday, the Air Force Research Laboratory introduced a two-year, $11 million effort to put together hardware and software tools for "Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement." "Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root level access," a request for proposals notes, "to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms... any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware." This isn't just some computer science study, mind you; "research efforts under this program are expected to result in complete functional capabilities."
A long term benefit of this program may be a better understanding of ways to circumvent security controls which leads to better operating system and trusted computing platform design. It wouldn't be the first ironic outcome of a military research initiative, after all the Internet started as a distributed system to ensure command and control capabilities in the event of a catastrophic attack and now it is a primary target for such attacks.
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