- Jan 24, 2011
- 9,378
You know how a military guy with a special briefcase was supposed to have followed the US president around, carrying what were allegedly the secret, continually changing codes needed to launch a nuclear attack?
It might as well have been filled with shredded newspaper, as Mashable's Joe Veix puts it.
That's because, according to a recently published paper about Permissive Action Links (PALs) - small security devices that prevent setting off nuclear weapons without the right code and the right authority - the "secret unlock" code for all US Minuteman nuclear missiles for almost 20 years during the Cold War was set to the jaw-droppingly simple code of eight zeros: 00000000.
Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia, discovered how easy it would have been to set off nuclear weapons after coming across a 2004 paperby Dr. Bruce G. Blair, a former Air Force officer who manned Minuteman silos and the subsequent president of the Center for Defense Information.
Read more: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/201...ch-code-for-us-nuclear-missiles-was-00000000/
It might as well have been filled with shredded newspaper, as Mashable's Joe Veix puts it.
That's because, according to a recently published paper about Permissive Action Links (PALs) - small security devices that prevent setting off nuclear weapons without the right code and the right authority - the "secret unlock" code for all US Minuteman nuclear missiles for almost 20 years during the Cold War was set to the jaw-droppingly simple code of eight zeros: 00000000.
Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia, discovered how easy it would have been to set off nuclear weapons after coming across a 2004 paperby Dr. Bruce G. Blair, a former Air Force officer who manned Minuteman silos and the subsequent president of the Center for Defense Information.
Read more: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/201...ch-code-for-us-nuclear-missiles-was-00000000/
