Genetic Malware
Sci-Fi becomes reality as strands of DNA are used to hack into a computer
If asked to consider potential malicious applications of genetic engineering, an image of some horrible artificial monster creature may come to mind, or some mutated form of super-cancer, or some other biological horror show. Essentially, you default to the structures composed of DNA as opposed to the DNA itself. It is often easy to forget that, although DNA is typically the instructions to creating and maintaining a living organism, that it is in essence, a means of encoding information. As such it has the capability of storing more or less any piece of information that can be stored in any other medium: a recipe, a book, a TV show, or even a computer virus.
Researchers at the university of Washington have recently made a rather outlandish and unexpected advancement in the field of cryptography: they successfully hacked a computer using only DNA.
Just internalize that concept for a moment: they hacked a computer simply by having it process a specific bit of DNA. Once the computer analyzed it, the data formed a virus which hijacked the program and then the computer. There are two main ways to look at this advancement. On one hand, this is a ridiculously cool and frankly, somewhat ludicrous concept. A true sci-fi moment in the modern world. But this is far from a mere curiosity. Although with present technology this is a rather impractical means of attack for criminals and hackers, in the future as genetic authentication methods potentially become more commonplace and genetic sequencing technology becomes cheap enough for increasing numbers of 3rd parties to perform the service, this revelation blasts a rather glaring hole in the integrity of such services in the future.
Of course, such a noteworthy issue will doubtless be cause for analysis and presents an entire new field of security in need of attention, and in effect this experiment has potential to create an entirely new field of genetic cryptography.
