OpenBSD Meets the Solar Neighborhood
April 21, 2112 — En route to Mars
The pilot sat in the break room of the Bellona Cruiser as it sailed on its ballistic trajectory towards Mars. He tapped polyrhythms on the edge of the table using two pencils as drumsticks. “Colonel, how much longer until we get there again?”
“Seven months, Eli,” said the colonel, floating lazily into the corner of the room with his hands clasped behind his head, gazing at the ceiling. “Seven more months and we’re there.”
“Jeez, only two months in and I’m already bored out of my mind.”
Dr. Brooke promptly turned off her tablet and floated up from the table. “Well, I’m going to go run this week’s urine samples through the centrifuge. Wanna come watch and learn, Eli?”
“Thanks, doc, but—nah. Looking at sediment under the microscope kind of gives me a headache.”.
“Suit yourself.” Dr. Brooke pushed off and floated through the doorway towards the laboratory. Eli placed his two pencil-drumsticks into a mesh pouch on the wall nearby, picked up a tablet computer, and began swiping.
“Ah—here’s one I haven’t read. Flight Computer System Maintenance Manual.” The colonel picked up a handheld radiation meter and began fiddling with it. “Hmm. Only two millisiverts...”.
A few minutes passed.
“Hey! This is interesting,” Eli said finally managing to engage his brain out of boredom. “Did you know the flight computer is running OpenBSD. I always assumed it was running Linux or Windows.”
“Yeah, NASA brought in a new CTO like 20 years ago who was a big OpenBSD guy. Thought the minimalist philosophy and uncompromising dedication to correctness would be great for flight software. Now pretty much everything onboard runs it now—except maybe Universal Waste Management System. I think that’s still running Windows.”
“OpenBSD is for security, isn’t it?”
“Bingo. That’s why, when you reboot the flight system, you see that weird white text on a blue background scroll by. The OpenBSD engineers figured out it was more secure that way. Let’s you know which messages are coming from the kernel and which are coming from user space. Pretty smart, huh?”
“Cool. I bet even aliens couldn’t hack this thing!”
“Heh! You’re probably right.”
Meanwhile, high above the ecliptic plane...
A sleek spaceship from the Barnard’s Star system quietly drifted in orbit scanning the star system below.
“Commander,” said Lt. Nogbel, the sensor officer on the bridge, “we’ve detected a small craft en route from the blue planet to the red one. Several lifeforms are onboard.”
Commander Korveth turned toward the rear workstation. “CybOps, run a scan. I want to see if we can scrape any data from them.”
“Aye, Commander,” said Specialist Zonlon, the cyber operations specialist, springing into action at his terminal. His keyboard had more than 200 keys and symbols were soon whizzing down his screen.
“The quantum field scanner has locked onto their main storage device, Commander. I have initiated a full download.”
“Excellent. Keep me posted.”
“Download complete, sir.” Specialist Zonlon said almost immediately. “Only a few dozen terabytes, mostly encrypted. I’m starting the quantum crypto-breaker. The key size is only 512 bits. The crypto-breaker should make pretty quick work of that. The unencrypted boot sector says that its running an OS called OpenBSD.”
“Open...what?” Commander Korveth said with a puzzled expression. “Never heard of that one before. I wonder if its some weird new thing the Zeptons are selling.”
“Could be, sir.” Specialist Zonlon glanced back at his screen. “Crypto-breaker just finished. Initiating AI reverse-engineering now.”
At this point, Lt. Tharn, the Defense Officer, quietly grumbling to himself from across the bridge, perked up. “Sir, shall I have weapons online, just to be safe?”.
“No. No. Keep ’em in stand-by mode, Tharn. Its not worth the power drain—I mean, not that we need to save power or anything, but still...” Lt. Tharn stood back, unamused at the situation.
“Sir, reverse engineering of the OS has completed.” Zonlon said as the attention of the room quickly shifted back to the Cyber Operations corner. “We have a full program model of the OS. AI confidence is 99.7%.
“How’s it rate?”
“Sophistication level two.”
The bridge burst in laughter. “Two?” the Commander Korveth asked. “Are you sure? We never saw anything less than a five on the Sirius and Alpha Centauri missions.”
“Its definitely a two, sir. Its a minimal OS with a clean design implemented in a simple programming language. It basically just stores files, runs programs, and connects to other computers. The system also comes with full source code and meticulously maintained documentation. It doesn’t have containers or even dynamic kernel modules let alone neural networks, qubits, or self-modification. It is scoring pretty high on tamper-resistance for a level two, though.”
“Alright then. Let’s see what they’ve got running on this OpenBSD. If its all this easy, we should have these guys pwn3d before lunch time.” Specialist Zonlon initiated reverse engineering of several daemons referenced in /etc/rc.conf with a burst of rapid key clicks and hitting the enter key after each command with forceful gusto.
“We should still be prepared, though, sir,” Lt. Tharn chimed in.
“Good point, Tharn. Hey, can you go down to the replicator and bring up some popcorn? Then we’ll be fully prepared for the show.”
Acknowledgements
ChatGPT was used in the preparation of this article for light proofreading, stylistic suggestions, formatting, and illustration.