BKLOVLCK.RVW   950602
 
%A   Orson Scott Card
%A   Kathryn H. Kidd
%C   49 West 24th Street or 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY  10010
%D   1994
%G   0-812-51805-5
%I   A TOR Book/Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
%S   Mayflower
%T   "Lovelock"
"Lovelock", Orson Scott Card/Kathryn H. Kidd, 1994, 0-812-51805-5
 
This book is the first of a trilogy, probably to do with the inhabitants of a
"village" of people aboard a starship.  The events take place in the final
stages of loading the starship, and while it is still in a "parking" (although
seemingly solar) orbit.
 
I would not like to ride in this starship.  The design is extremely suspect. 
It is a standard, slower-than-light, ark.  The radios are so bad that once the
engines turn on, no one is able to send so much as a telegram to earth.  And
while some minimal psychological testing appears to have been done, almost no
social planning has gone on.
 
However, between now and then, computer networks and security have not
progressed and may, in fact, have regressed.  Trapdoors are introduced into
security software, and go ten years without being found.  Anyone, though, has
"read" access to the said security software, and can disassemble it to find the
trapdoor.  (This is not, by the way, a compiler pass-along such as Ken Thompson
proposed, just a simple patch which would be overwritten by the first upgrade.) 
Passwords can be decrypted, indicating that "one-way" encryption has been lost. 
So have PGP and PEM:  encryption is regarded as an add-on rather than integral,
and "single sign-on" is an advanced topic.
 
Before these loopholes are corrected, the Lovelock of the title manages to
write a virus-like program which installs itself everywhere on the network.  It
doesn't occupy any disk space, doesn't appear in memory, and doesn't hook any
interrupts, so it isn't detectable.  It must also be magic in order to work
under those conditions.
 
copyright Robert M. Slade, 1995   BKLOVLCK.RVW   950602

==============
Vancouver      roberts@decus.ca         | You realize, of
Institute for  Robert_Slade@sfu.ca      | course, that these
Research into  Rob.Slade@f733.n153.z1/  | new facts do not 
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