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September 26, 2010
Plant Breakdown
Over the last few days I have been piecing together a number of reports on the Iranian nuclear efforts. The reports lead me to some interesting conclusions/speculations. More on the conclusions/speculations later. First let me start with the breakdown of Iran's enrichment centrifuges from July of this year.
Well isn't that interesting? And that is not the only interesting thing. We have some recent reports about the Stuxnet computer virus. More accurately described as a worm. But virus will do for generic discussions.
Some folks think it was targeted at Iran's nuclear power plant which is due to come on line in the next few months.
Note the bolded text. I'm going to develop that theme further.
And there are more clues.
Well that is clear as mud to anyone but a code geek (me, me, me). So how about a layman's explanation?
But what if it is not something big breaking down? Suppose it is a lot of not so big somethings? Like centrifuges. And suppose the code was designed to misregulate the speed of centrifuges so that they break down from overspeed. You want your code to only go into operation only when the centrifuges were at operational speed. It is not very destructive if the code starts working when the centrifuges were at a relatively slow speed. You can hit the master power switch manually if erratic operation is observed at slow speed. One thing this points to is that who ever designed the virus/worm had to know exactly what parts of the control computer were used to control a vulnerable processes. The kinds of controllers used to control machinery have lots of options in terms of how their internal computers are configured to control a given device. Is it Timer 1 or Timer 6? Port 0 or Port 7? And other such details. So inside information is definitely required. Speculation is that the Russians designed the control system. So did the Russians design the virus? Or did they hand off the details of the design to some one else to design the virus? Which reminds me of something that happened during the 2007 Israeli attack on a purported Syrian nuclear installation where a defense system provided by Russia didn't work as advertised. Curious. Perhaps the Israelis had inside information on the vulnerabilities of the Russian defense system. Or the Russians told the Israelis of a backdoor that they could access in real time by sending the right sequence of pulses (say via a radar jamming device) to the Russian system. Now for the speculation I promised at the beginning. Such a software attack depends on a few things. First off Iran had to do research and development to design the uranium enrichment equipment. This takes time. Once such a system is developed and the hardware and software are working the production of the systems had to be ramped up. Any attack on the systems before a significant number are deployed would blunt the attack. Such an attack could only have maximum effectiveness when the systems were in production and significant quantities were deployed. Any attack would have to be timed with some precision. Too soon and the attack is ineffective. Too late and well... it would be too late. So there is a window of opportunity maybe a few months. A year at most. So who ever did the attack had to have inside information, not only about the equipment used but also the deployment rate. That kind of attack is best done when as much system integration as possible was completed in order to maximize the damage. So where do the Iranians go from here? Basically they have to start from scratch because they do not know if there are any unknown vulnerabilities still hiding in their systems. Which means they may still have a good design for centrifuges but all the supporting control equipment must be redesigned from the ground up. This could take several more years (or more) depending on the level of testing being done. And the testing will be much more severe than it was the first time around to prevent (as much as possible) a repeat. In this case the advantage lies with the offense. This is because they must fill all the security holes while the attackers only need to find one or a very few vulnerabilities. The question for the regime in Iran is: can they keep a lid on their population until they are successful? Only time will tell. So what would I do? Accelerate the collapse of the Chinese real estate bubble so that petroleum demand falls below a price level that can sustain Iran. Bleed them economically. I covered the economic war against Iran at: Iran to Enter Cash Flow Jihad Zone and Iran's economic vulnerability (actually written by A. Jacksonian) at: A lot of food for thought. Cross Posted at Power and Control posted by Simon on 09.26.10 at 10:45 AM
Comments
david, Plant statistics and overall production rates. It is the latest and greatest in plant control. And it does good things. If you look at how centrifuge enrichment works it would be quite useful. M. Simon · September 28, 2010 10:40 PM Post a comment
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Sounds like using this for an attack on enrichment centrifuges would work only if the centrifuges were networked together and centrally controlled: otherwise it would look pretty weird for someone to be going around inserting the USB stick in every single controller. Which makes me wonder what the point of networking them together would have been in the first place.