Now even DNA can be used to hack computers!

A team at the University of Washington recently announced that they have successfully hacked a computer by encoding malicious code into DNA, and executing it on any computer that transcribes the DNA. 

So how does this attack work?

Basically, the application that transcribes the DNA has a fixed size buffer in which the data read from the DNA is stored. This means that the system is susceptible to a buffer overflow attack. 

What is a buffer overflow attack?

In a buffer overflow attack, the attacker knows the memory structure of the system to be hacked. The attacker sends a more-than-normal amount of data to the system. If the system isn't actually checking the length of the data received, it can end up overflowing the space in memory alloted to that data, and some part of the data to be written ends up in memory locations assigned to a different process or application. So, if you know that a certain memory location contains code that is executed with root privileges, you can write over that code with your own malicious code. The next time that memory location is accessed, instead of the original code, your malicious code is executed with root privileges. 

The researchers used this very attack, by encoding the buffer overflow code in the DNA. The malicious code, when run with root privileges, executes other code, which is the one that actually does whatever damage you want to do to the system.

How much of a threat is this for normal computer users?

Unless you have instruments that transcribe data from DNA, your computer has no risk. But this shows, that any system that can be used to transport information, can also be used to transfer malicious code and infect the system. Today, this is not a big deal, but say 20 years from now, we're using DNA as a means of authentication, or even as a general purpose storage medium; the possibilities of this wrecking authentication systems is immense. 

Now, to be fair, buffer overflow exploits are some of the oldest hacks in computing, so they are pretty easy to fix on most systems.Also, most high-level languages will never give you access to the low-level memory functions required to run this exploit. I think that's what they should have done - never let the transcribing software access to low-level memory functions.

Conclusion

This is the kind of exploit where you wonder, "that would make a great plot point in a sci-fi movie", but in real life, at least right now, there is no practical danger from this exploit for almost anyone reading this post. 

Thank you for reading this post. If you liked it, please upvote and resteem it. Follow me for more content like this :-)

@harshallele

Sources: 

Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/09/malicious-code-written-into-dna-infects-the-computer-that-reads-it/ 

Cover image from pixabay.