Ant Farms versus Ant Communities

[Dave Aitel <dave () immunitysec com>]

So yesterday walking through downtown Singapore, I found a colony of 
tiny ants that had stretched itself between a tree and a man-made rain 
protection stand a few meters away. Apparantly there was one nest in the 
roof of this tin construction, and another next in the tree somewhere. 
In between were about five million ants going back and forth. Which 
gives you two options really:

1. This is a main thoroughfare for the colony, and they're strong enough 
to have one of their main thoroughfares go through open air with no 
protection.

2. This is not a main thoroughfare, and they happen to be big enough 
that even a tiny path between two parts of their nest has the equivelent 
traffic of 495 during rush hour.

I want nanotechnology to get to the point where I can put a little 
transmitter in every ant in a colony, and study it from an information 
flow perspective. Somewhere in the two millimeters of ant is a program 
for doing cooperative transmission of information far better than Kazaa, 
that scales to billions of ants and can protect itself from outside 
interference. Perhaps we can build a FreeNet that works afterwards?

For example, the next distributed p2p trojan (Helium) should mutate 
itself if it sees an ID for a peer and then loses it a certain number of 
times. This would indicate that someone has a program to remove the 
trojan. I'm sure there's something similar in ant DNA somewhere. "If I 
smell enough dead ants, it's time to change my behavior." The devil is 
in the details though. Change your behavior to what exactly? I didn't 
test my theory on the giant ant colony, since clearly they are colassal 
badasses. Also, there is probably a law against crushing ants even for 
scientific purposes here in Singapore. I'm interested in ant 
navagational skills too, since they're 3-d landscape navigation is 
pretty similar to a lot of computer science problems, I bet. Actually, I 
just think ants are more fun than computers.

In an hour or so I'll be teaching some people how to write basic Windows 
overflows. It's actually not that hard, but it's hard to learn on your 
own, compared to seeing someone walk through it. The one thing I hope 
the class also teaches is the mindset that comes with being able to 
write and find bugs. Something in that mindset is important. It keeps 
people from making physical information security analogies because they 
implicitly can tell that no physical analogy is valid. In the long run, 
having more people able to write bugs is good for the world, because it 
increases appreciation for the art, and prevents stupid and harmful 
things like OIS from gaining traction.

In a way, I think that any set of people that communicates as much as 
we, or a bunch of ants, do, is a community and has a certain set of 
resposibilities. It's important for us to provide a catch-net to prevent 
our members from getting desperate and cannibalistic.


Dave Aitel
Immunity, Inc.












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