Jason LaPier - Unexpected Rain

The guard’s smile drooped slightly at being brought into the conversation by the prisoner. He looked at Jax and then at Runstom.

“There’s a file for this prisoner,” Runstom said. “A file that has to go to the System Attorney out at the court on Outpost Alpha. Could you please bring me that file?” The guard started to move, but hesitated. Runstom flipped through his notebook, as if looking for something. “I have a copy of it, but I left it back in my quarters,” he lied awkwardly. “I know the detectives left a copy that gets transferred with the prisoner. Could you please just have someone bring me that copy?”

The guard gave him a conspicuous look, like he didn’t trust Runstom completely, but then apparently decided he didn’t much care, because he shrugged and left the room. He came back a few seconds later and said, “Someone will bring it in just a moment, Officer.”

“Thank you very much,” Runstom said. He turned to Jax. “Okay, Jax. What’s the deal? What if you did have to authenticate twice? What will we see on those logs?”

“If I mistyped my password, then you’ll see an authentication failure. Followed by a successful auth a few seconds later,” Jax said. “But I don’t think we’ll see any failed auths.”

“And what does that mean? If there are no authentication failures?”

“It means that I wasn’t authenticated the second time. I just thought I was.”

“I don’t follow you,” Runstom said, desperately trying to focus.

“It was another program. Something that gave me a fake login prompt. Even though I was already logged into the system, I saw the login prompt and thought I was not logged in yet. I give it my voiceprint, fingerprint, and password again, and the prompt goes away. And that program runs whatever it is meant to run.”

Runstom rolled around the concept in his brain, thinking out loud. “So you see a login prompt. You think you are authenticating, but really you are telling some program to run. This program runs some commands, and it’s running them from your console – because you told the program to do it.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Jax.

A B-fourean officer came back into the room and handed a folder to Runstom. He was an officer Runstom hadn’t seen before, an astonishingly young rookie. Runstom thanked him and the officer exchanged smiles with the guard in the room and went on his way.

Runstom dove into the folder, digging out the console logs. He came around to the other side of the table and he and Jax pored over the printouts together. “The incident occurred at 2:03AM,” Runstom said.

“Here!” Jax excitedly poked the page. “Look. Here’s when I authenticated, at 2:01AM. No auth failure. Only one auth success.”

Runstom stared at the log in silence. His heart pounded as the realization dawned on him that his hunch was right. This was no open-and-shut case, as much as his detectives wanted it to be. There was a wrinkle, and Stanford Runstom was onto it.

“So now what?” Jax said anxiously.

Runstom stood up and paced slowly around the table. He could feel the thrill of the discovery enticing him, but he had to remind himself that this double-authentication trick only meant something if Jax was telling the truth. Even if he weren’t deliberately lying, he was only going on a memory of having to log in twice. There was nothing in the printouts that corroborated the anomaly Jax was describing.

“If we could get back into your LifSup system, could we find this hidden program?”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up,” Jax said. “Anyone who was smart enough to design this kind of program probably knew enough to cover their tracks.” He paused, and Runstom was forced to cock his head in bemusement to get him to extrapolate. “The invasive program’s final command was most likely to delete itself.”

“Right,” Runstom said, resignation in his voice. “Okay. So how did it get there?”

“Well,” Jax replied, lost in thought. “There are no data ports on the consoles themselves. And the controls on the console are only set up for running commands. So you couldn’t sit at a console and enter in the program code manually. They could have jacked into the LifSup system itself, but access to the hardware is locked down tighter than a drum.” He stopped and thought for another minute or two, folding his hands together and bending his fingers, occasionally finding a knuckle to crack. “Of course, there’s always the up-link access. There’s a satellite up-link built into each LifSup system so that Central Engineering can push down updates.”

“Updates?”

“Yeah, bug-fixes and stuff. Revisions to the program code that are supposed to make it run better.”

“Okay.” Runstom started thinking out loud again. “So someone could have used this up-link to put the program into your LifSup. Does that mean they would have used a satellite somehow?”

“Yeah. Well. Not necessarily a satellite. But in order to speak to the receiver down here, they’d have to do it from somewhere in orbit around the planet. I don’t know much about satellite communication. But it seems like it’d be possible for someone in some other kind of space vessel to carry the same kind of transmitter that a satellite would use, and beam the signal down to our receiver.”

Runstom took a moment to digest that. “Wouldn’t the data coming down from a satellite be secure?”

“Yes, I’m sure there’s an identification process,” Jax said. “Plus an encryption layer. So we’re talking two possibilities here. Either they somehow mimicked a known satellite, which would be tricky, because they’d have to get information used to generate the identification of the specific piece of hardware out there in space.”

“And we are already looking at the possibility of someone who has enough inside information about a LifSup system to be able to circumvent the safety checks,” Runstom said. “So we can’t rule that out.”

Jax nodded slowly. “Yeah, true. The other possibility is that they knew of some other channel, some back-door or something into a LifSup system.”

“You mean like some other up-link?”

“Well, not really. I mean the same up-link, but during the handshake – when the signals are being sent from each end to identify itself – there could be some kind of code that you could send to the LifSup side to get direct access to the system.”

“Why would there be some secret code?” Runstom asked. “I mean, if they can already send updates through the up-link, why would they need a ‘back-door’ into the system?”

Jax pulled his arms up and twisted his upper body in his chair, popping a few kinks in his back as he did. “Well, it’s just an idea. I’ve seen technicians when they’re working on a system that’s not behaving normally. When something subtle is off, they like to use a special port somewhere on the LifSup main unit. They plug directly into it with their personal computer and send it some special code that gives them full-access to the system. I figure it’s the kind of thing that’s universal across LifSup systems, or at least LifSup systems of the same model. It’s just there for troubleshooting purposes.”

“So you figure that there’s another back-door in the up-link that works the same way a technician uses a physical port to get into a system,” Runstom reasoned.

“Now, I don’t know that for a fact,” the operator said, spreading his hands out in front of him. The more he had to explain technology, the more physically mobile he seemed to get. “Let’s just say, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were such a back-door.”

“Okay, okay.” Runstom nodded and looked down at his notes. It was all speculation, and it was all hinging on this prisoner being wrongfully accused. Runstom willed himself to resist judgment one way or the other, but he felt like he had to decide if it was even possible for someone to exploit the system in such a way. Was it even possible for Jax to have been set up? “So we have so far. One, someone who knows the internals of Life Support systems writes some code that would open both sets of venting doors on a block. Two, they disguise this code and set it up to run as a replacement for a login prompt, knowing that it would cause some operator to unwittingly execute it. Three, they beam the code down from a transmitter of some kind to the satellite up-link of the LifSup system at block 23-D.”