Pierluigi Paganini October 31, 2015

The hacking world will change. Instead of hacking based on computer programming as today, the hacking will be based on chemistry, biology, and physics.

In the medium term future, the hacking world will change. Instead of hacking based on computer programming as today, the hacking will be based on chemistry, biology and physics. This article will explain this claim. For the discussion, I will split the hacking scene to two main scenarios – Hacking to autonomic machines and hacking to the human body.

In “autonomous machines”, I refer to self-healing machines that can find and fix vulnerabilities in the code by them self. When this kind of machines will be developed, they will turn the hackers useless. In this future reality, only machines will hack each other. I will come back to this future later.

In the other scenario, humans control the machines, and hackers are manipulating them to hack the machines. In a deeper vision, humans are building the machines, programming them, using and fixing them. All the life-cycle of the machines is controlled by humans. Therefore, by hacking the human behavior, one can control the machine.

To make it clearer, when one hacks a machine, he exploits the code that another human has written for the machine or the behavior of human that uses the machine. Zero-day vulnerabilities, backdoor’s or logic bombs, are all failures of humans. When the autonomous machines are developed, all those failures will be reduced to a minimum or even disappear with time.

In “minimize failures” reality, it will become much harder for hackers to hack the machines, forcing them to go mostly after humans. One can imagine the machinery infrastructure as the transport and storage layer of human knowledge. And if that layer becomes unhackable, we are talking about hacking the human brain or body to get the knowledge or behavior we want to get.

Going back to the second scenario, hacking will turn to biological computing systems [as the human body] rather than machinery based systems as today. It will change the hacking profession. Computer science will be replaced with chemistry, biology and physics.

While it seems like science fiction to some, I believe it’s the future. Any country that will want to maintain a competitive advantage with others in the futuristic cyber domain, should educate the young generation in those professions. It should be noticed that educating someone in chemistry, biology or physics [MA\Phd] takes a longer period than to do it for computer science \ programming.

This conclusion is applicable also to the business world. The change won’t be linear. When autonomic machines will enter the market, all the existing cyber solutions will be obsolete. No human will be able to write a code that protects against a cyber attack by autonomous machine. It will be companies that developed offense \ defense solutions for the human body that will survive.

To summarize, the cyber domain is a dynamic technology field based today on machines. And because of that, the machines are becoming more efficient in their way to an autonomous degree.

It’s not “if,” but a “When” question. It will be who understand it and embrace it that will lead the future cyber domain. Those who will keep “Hold a bull’s horn” will become irrelevant.

Written by Ami Rojkes Dombe

Edited by Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Cyber security, hacking)