"Alice works as a lab assistant at UltraMegaCorp. UltraMegaCorp makes genetically engineered microbes which eat cancer. Alice works with the engineering team which develops these microbes. The bio-engineers all think she is a moron. They've handed Alice the complete DNA sequence for their new product so she can compile some documentation for their patent application.

"It turns out that Alice is not a moron. Alice also hates her job. Her boyfriend works for DingSungDiaHa, a Red Chinese company run by the military. DingSungDiaHa will pay Alice millions for this formula, but she has to make it out of the building with a copy. The critical section which DingSungDaiHa needs is only about 3k of data.

"Everytime Alice leaves the building, she is searched. Any printed or digital media on her person is carefully examined. Alice doesn't know how smart the examiners are, so she has to assume they can figure out things. There is also a crack Internet security team which runs various tools on UltraMegaCorp's network in an attempt to discover anomalous behavior. Again, Alice has to assume they can figure out things.

"How can Alice get the 3k of data out of the building?"

(The above scenario is a variation on the one Decius presented at interz0ne II.)

One Hypothesis -- and the Origin of SARS?

We submit that Alice could in fact smuggle out any of UltraMegaCorp's data, biological or otherwise. First, she encodes the data as a DNA sequence (with the four nucleotides Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine as the 2-bit unit of information), which the 3k of data already is. Using a machine in the lab, she synthesizes the sequence.

Alice inserts the sequence into a cold virus. She infects herself with the virus, passes through UltraMegaCorp's security undetected, and personally delivers the virus/sequence to her Red Chinese handlers in Hong Kong.

However, this has the side effect that everyone who came into contact with Alice now has severe respiratory problems.

Exercise for the reader: create an avian-influenza variation on this scenario. (Sidebar: Bird flu has received far more attention than it warrants. Unless you are living in World War I conditions, like Europe in 1918, consider yourself immune to even the H5N1 strain. If you are living hungry and cold, in crowded areas with rotting carcasses, with no public health system, then you are susceptible to bird flu -- and have much more to worry about than a single germ.)

Last modified: 1/31/2007