A group of Iraqi fighters bring down a U.S. Apache helicopter. Immediately, the insurgents run to the flaming wreckage and find the black box. They bring it back to their base, decode the software and use it to gain access codes, codes that allow them to view troop movements and listen in on key battlefield communications.
Impossible?
Well, kind of.
Arxan research engineer Eric Bryant, who helped head-up the Software Protection Evaluation Course on Saturday at Ball State, said programmers go into the process of coding information knowing full-well that cyber terrorists will inevitably get in.
"Fundamentally, they're going to win; it's just how difficult and how painful you can make it for them," Bryant said.
Bryant's organization, Arxan, is a San Francisco-based computer security company that works closely with the federal government to protect computer software from hackers, the organization's Web site said.
Bryant said the goal of file encrypting is to make the "time to defeat," or time it takes for a hacker to get in, unreasonable.
"If you can create a protection that can last for a month, we're very impressed," Bryant said.
Event organizer and Ball State graduate student Amitai Sasson said one guard programmers use to protect their software is called a honey pot.
"A honey pot leads you on as a hacker," Sasson said. "It makes you think you're in, but you're never really in."
Sasson said hacking is a lot like breaking into a building.
"When hackers get into a honey pot, they've gotten past the wall, " he said. "They're looking around thinking they're finding stuff, but what they don't understand is there's this other wall, the real wall, that's blocking all the important information."
Sasson said companies and governments can also use honey pots to track hackers and discover their identities.
"Sometimes it will lock you in, so you can't get back out," he said. "You've gone through all this work and to get to this point, but now they see you and they know everything about you."
The purpose of the seminar was to help people understand the motives and skills of computer hackers.
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