by Jack Bowie
“Yes, as a network security consultant.”
“Oh, a consultant.” Braxton could feel the condescension in his voice. According to many executives, the old saw went: “ . . . those who can’t, consult.”
“You mentioned some kind of report,” Chamberlain continued. “What was it?”
“It was an email to the Center from George Washington University, Warren.” He pulled a copy of the Saracen message from his folio and handed it to Chamberlain.
The executive took a moment to read the printout. “There’s certainly not much detail here. Have you contacted this . . . Saracen?”
“I went down to D.C. earlier in the week, but unfortunately there was some kind of accident and he was killed. He didn’t have much additional information in his files.”
The calm in Chamberlain’s face was suddenly replaced by a look of surprise. “He’s dead? How?”
“A bomb. The police think he might have been some kind of terrorist and accidentally blew himself up.”
Chamberlain looked down and appeared to be studying the message. When he replied, there was a chill in his tone. “How unfortunate. But what does this have to do with Century, Adam? Doesn’t it mean the incident will be closed?”
Braxton felt his heart pounding. How could he approach Chamberlain with his suspicions? What would be his reaction? He seemed ready to write the incident off.
“Normally, I guess it would, but since I couldn’t get any information from Mr. Ramal, that’s this Saracen’s real name, I started doing some investigating. I’ve been able to reproduce some of his results. It does appear that there are unusual transmissions from the gateway at GW. And it’s a Century gateway, Warren. That’s why I wanted to come and see you.”
“You’ve been monitoring the gateway yourself?” Chamberlain was gripping the message so tightly his fingers were turning white.
“Yes, the Center gave me the appropriate access codes. I was hoping you might have a look at the monitor printouts and help me understand what might be causing the transmissions. They could just be from some internal software monitors that you have added to the system. If I could talk to some of your system designers, we can probably get this resolved right away.”
Chamberlain paused and stared down at the printout. “That would be very difficult right now, Adam,” he finally replied, bringing his eyes back to meet Braxton’s. “The teams are working to finish a product release. If you give me the printouts, I can probably get an answer back to you in a day or so.”
Braxton was shocked at Chamberlain’s reticence. For all of his management faults, he was usually quite willing to delegate a detail like this to the experts. “I’m sure it would be easier if I could just speak with someone from the group, Warren. Is Terry Adams still around?”
Chamberlain handed the copy of the email back to Braxton. He slid forward on the couch and placed his hands in his lap, absentmindedly playing with a large gold ring on his right hand. “Adam, please believe me that it is impossible right now. Everyone is very busy on a new release. Let me take the output and I’ll make sure that we get you an answer.”
What’s the big deal? Why can’t he have it checked out now?
Braxton felt Chamberlain’s dark eyes pressing the point. He opened the folio, extracted a sheaf of listings and passed them across the table. Chamberlain skimmed the sheets then placed them neatly on the table top. “Have you shown this data to anyone else?”
“Not yet, Warren. I wanted to review it with you before anything went back to CERT.”
Chamberlain’s behavior was making him angry. And the EVP’s face showed an emotion he couldn’t quite decipher. Maybe he needed to push harder.
“But if you are unwilling to help,” he added sharply, “I can request additional support from CERT. I was hoping that would not be necessary.”
“Of course we will assist, Adam,” Chamberlain replied quickly. His voice became sharp and cold. “I just wouldn’t want anyone to be embarrassed by a premature disclosure. It could have a devastating effect on a career.”
Braxton flushed. He should have expected Chamberlain to return the threat, but not with such wrath. What the hell had just happened?
Chamberlain rose from the couch. Another audience was over. “It was really good to see you again, Adam. I’ll have these analyzed and send you the results. I’m sure we’ll find that it’s just some new feature that we’ve added.”
He showed Braxton to the door. “Florence, can you please take Adam downstairs?” Chamberlain turned back to Braxton and offered his hand, “Adam, best of luck in your new venture. Be sure and call us again.”
“I certainly will, Warren. You can count on it.” He locked eyes with his ex-boss then turned and followed Winters to the elevator. For some reason, Chamberlain had wanted to play games over a simple request. What was he so concerned about?
Once downstairs he said good-bye to Winters, each of them making empty promises to keep in touch, and signed out. Before he left, he stopped and stood in the middle of the pretentious lobby, letting the demons of Century Computer have one more chance at him. None came. He knew he had finally put that nightmare to rest.
He also knew one other thing with certainty. Chamberlain had lied about not recognizing the anomaly. He knew more than he was saying.
Chamberlain had a “tell”. Braxton didn’t know whether anyone else had ever recognized it, but he had been in too many meetings with the executive to not have picked it up.
It was that damn rat. The gold ring on Chamberlain’s right hand was his MIT class ring, better known as a “brass rat”. It was Chamberlain’s battle ribbon; a not so subtle reminder of his technical pedigree. Unlike other college rings with an oval bezel, the MIT ring’s was square. And not inlaid with a colorful stone, but with an engraving of an animal: the American beaver, or “nature’s engineer” as Chamberlain explained it.
He wore it at all times, when it served variously as proof of his technical chops when presented in an introductory handshake, as an attention-grabbing gavel at meetings by tapping on a table or glass, and probably as a pretty effective brass knuckle, if he had ever lost his famously frigid temperament.
But most importantly, the ring was his tell. When under stress, Chamberlain would use his right thumb to spin the ring on his finger. Then to spin it again, and again, and again.
Braxton had first noted the behavior in an important meeting with the DoD. When questioned as to the security of Century’s newest enterprise router, Chamberlain had smiled, spun away, and assured the two-stars that the device met all of DoD’s requirements.
As head of QA at the time, Braxton knew that they were only halfway through the test suite, and the list of failures was growing daily. As did Chamberlain. The bugs were eventually fixed and six months later Century was the recipient of a ten million dollar router acquisition, but in Braxton’s mind, Chamberlain had lied and risked the integrity of the whole company.
Braxton had spotted the tell a number of times after that, including the day Chamberlain had let him go. It had been another cold, rainy October day. He had just finished his staff review when Winters had brought him to Chamberlain’s office and his boss had told him Century needed to cut back and his position was no longer required. The ring was spun throughout the sentencing.
Business had taken a down-turn and Braxton had been a part of a wider corporate layoff, so why the tell? He had always wondered what Chamberlain had not told him.
The meeting today had been very different. Chamberlain had seemed much less frightening, much less in control of Braxton’s destiny. In fact, he had almost looked afraid.
Braxton looked out the glass wall and saw beams of sunlight cutting through the dark clouds. He calmly strode across the lobby, opened the door, and continued to his car.
He wasn’t going to wait for Chamberlain; he had work to do.
Chapter 26
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Friday, 11:15 a.m.
BRAXTON
SAVORED HIS lightened mood on the drive back into Cambridge. A brisk wind from the Berkshires had driven the storm clouds out to sea allowing a bright yellow sun to revitalize the landscape. He felt exhausted yet strangely refreshed.
Why had Chamberlain seemed so uncomfortable?
He was sure the EVP felt just as awkward as he did as a result of their history, but Braxton had sensed something deeper than that. Chamberlain had always been a very private man. Even during the times when they were working closely together, Braxton had felt that he was holding something back. He was a brilliant computer scientist, often exhibiting flashes of insight that were out-of-place for a senior executive. As a manager he was less effective, but Braxton had accepted that as typical behavior for technologists with little interest, or training, in interpersonal skills.
Yet he had been sure Chamberlain would help him identify the anomaly. Incidents like this reflected negatively on the whole industry, and the sooner they were resolved the easier it would be to limit the negative publicity. There was too much at stake to ignore them.
The benign world of computing had been changed forever when the Morris Worm surfaced. The Worm had only infected computers manufactured by Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation. The marketing staffs of these two hugely successful companies had been stretched to their limits to control the damage to their reputations, and their revenue streams.
There would be other incidents in the future, and other names such as De Guzman, Poulsen, Mitnick and Anonymous, that would be enshrined in the annals of computer history. Usually, the commercial impact of the incident greatly overshadowed the reality of the direct damage. Ultimately, the fallout of these incidents had affected all the vendors, as buyers’ increased concerns over security slowed purchases and forced more extensive product testing.
As he entered Cambridge at Fresh Pond Circle, one particular aspect of the Worm kept coming back to him. Morris’s rogue had been very specific, only affecting computers made by two vendors. What did this mean for his investigation?
* * *
Braxton stopped for a sandwich in the Square then returned to his apartment. There was something he was missing. All he had were disconnected pieces of a puzzle. Despite his relief after the morning’s meeting, he wasn’t doing very well at fitting the pieces together. Time to start again from the beginning; it was a technique that he had used numerous times before on difficult problems. It usually worked.
He went back to the study and grabbed a stack of listings and reports. Fifteen minutes later he had spread them over his expanded dining room table, completely covering its surface. He started jotting questions on yellow Post-It notes and sticking them on the documents. He would consider an issue, pick up a related pile of paper, and place it down on a different part of the table. Unfortunately, each new configuration seemed to lead to another dead-end.
About two o’clock he heard a knock on his door and a surprisingly sophisticated-looking Paul Terrel walked through the door. His hair was brushed smartly back, his short pony-tail hanging proudly over the collar of a trim, double-breasted business suit. Braxton almost didn’t recognize him.
“Paul! Is that really you? I didn’t know you even owned an outfit like that.”
“Hey, come on, Adam. Give me a break. I had to present the results on the new quants to a tableful of VPs. I figured I’d better look the part or they might not even listen.”
“How’d you do?”
A huge smile crossed his face and his eyes twinkled. “I nailed it!”
He yanked the knot of his tie loose, then glanced over to the stacks of papers on the table. “I smelled smoke and figured you must be hard at work. What are you trying to do, start a bonfire?”
“Still working on the CERT assignment.” Braxton swept his hand over the table. “I was trying to lay out all the data; thought it might help me think through it better.”
Terrel came over to the table and scanned Braxton’s notes. “Looks like a whole lot more questions than answers. How’d the visit to Century go?”
Braxton shook his head and shrugged. “I actually got in to see my old boss, Warren Chamberlain. He‘s one of the Century founders and runs product development. But the bastard stonewalled me. He wouldn’t even let me talk with any of his engineers. I gave him a copy of my notes and he said he’d get back to me. I don’t know. But it sure felt like he was hiding something.”
Terrel picked up one of the stacks and leafed through the printouts. “What’s this?”
“That’s the records of the transmissions. I was trying to figure out what might have caused them.”
His neighbor smiled. “You don’t like my mole theory? Couldn’t some kind of virus or worm have gotten into the gateway?”
“I suppose it’s possible, but I’ve worked on those systems and they’re incredibly complex. And what would it do once it was there? The configuration maps are all public. Gateways don’t have any files worth stealing.”
“There must be some set of software functions the mole could use.” Terrel flipped through another pile of listings. “How about any trapdoors?”
Getting no response, Terrel looked up and saw Braxton staring glassy-eyed out the window.
“Adam?”
Suddenly it all clicked. Trapdoors. The Internet Worm. Century. He didn’t believe it was possible.
“What if the mole didn’t have to break in? What if it was there already?” Braxton raced into the living room, ran his hand along one of the bookshelves, and picked out a small volume. Then he headed for the study.
“What do mean there already?” Terrel called out as he followed his friend’s circuitous path.
Braxton dropped down at his PC. Terrel watched over his shoulder as he simultaneously typed commands and explained his discovery. “It started about five years ago while I was still at Century. My group had been investigating new algorithms for directing messages through networks. We decided to test our theoretical results by developing a new type of network gateway.
“A gateway, like a network router or bridge, is normally set up as a dedicated, black-box, system. Plug them in, connect the input and output communications lines, and let them do their thing: controlling and balancing the flow of messages through their ports. Gateways do handle management data streams, like the Simple Network Management Protocol, and sometimes they hold files that can be accessed across the net with ftp, but most aren’t set up as general purpose systems. You can’t just log on to them and run a program.
“This packaging is ideal for most users, but it made developing and debugging the new algorithms a real hell for the researchers. My team wrote a special suite of programs that would permit much faster and easier investigation of network problems. We could correct routing tables, modify algorithms, and examine messages all inside the gateway.”
Terrel nodded in understanding. “You built a library of gateway software tools. I did the same thing when I wrote the quant program. I had specific routines for special calculations and unique user displays. I could add the ones I wanted and remove ones that didn’t work. These systems are too complex to be built as single programs.”
“Right. The tools made the researchers significantly more productive. When Century decided to make the prototype gateway into a product, the development engineers wanted access to our tools as well.”
“It sounds like your work got Century up to speed fast.”
“Yeah. They never would have been able to deliver their next generation network products without those capabilities.” He paused, remembering the morning’s trip. “My reward was a goddamn pink slip.”
Braxton had stopped typing and sat back in his chair. He wasn’t sure he wanted to take the next step.
“The tools were a boon during implementation and field testing,” Braxton finally continued, “but they couldn’t be put into the production systems. Customers would freak if they knew we could manipulate the data they were pumping through the system. Engineering was supposed to re
move the capabilities from shipping products.” He looked up at Terrel and his face was grave. “What if they weren’t deleted; if they were still waiting, dormant, in the systems?”
“Jesus.” Terrel grabbed another chair and pulled it over to the desk. “Someone could get into the gateway and change the routing, or even the content, of messages. Could they generate new messages?”
“Sure,” Braxton replied matter-of-factly. “We used that feature all the time to monitor the effectiveness of new algorithms. We’d have the router send regular statistical reports back to us for analysis.”
“That could explain what we’re seeing, but why send diagnostic messages? That’s no big deal.”
“What if they’re not diagnostics? Our tools could query any part of the gateway, even the incoming messages.”
“You mean they could be reading everybody’s transmissions? Every email?” The look on Terrel’s face was a combination of shock and horror.
“Absolutely. And if they liked what they read, they could copy it and send it on to someone else. Dammit, Paul, Century could be reading everything on the Net!”
Terrel raised his hands. “Whoa, slow down, Adam. What about encryption? Most email these days is encoded. I know Wallace’s is. The gateway couldn’t read that.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Braxton turned back to his desk and typed a search phrase into Google. He hoped he could find what he wanted. “You know all the rhetoric about it taking a computer a thousand years to crack a standard encryption?”
Terrel nodded. “Sure. That’s the benchmark.”
“So a thousand computers could do it in a year. And a million computers in less than a day.”
“Okay, but who could commandeer a million computers, and get them to cooperate on a single problem?”
Braxton pointed to one of the screens. It showed a research report on the market for internet routers and gateways. The yearly shipments of these devices was over ten million units.
“Jesus,” Terrel exclaimed. “There’s that many routers in the world?”