The RISKS Digest
Volume 8 Issue 19

Wednesday, 1st February 1989

Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems

ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

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Contents

Massachusetts limits disclosure of driver's license database.
Jon Jacky
Dead Code Maintenance
Douglas Jones
Re: Structured Programming
Eric Roskos
Random Thoughts on Redundancy
Earl Boebert
One last word about probabilities
Dr Robert Frederking
Independence and probabilities
PGN
Counting Engines
Mike Bell
Talk by Roy Saltman on computerized vote tallying
Charles Youman
Info on RISKS (comp.risks)

Massachusetts limits disclosure of driver's license database.

<jon@june.cs.washington.edu>
Tue, 31 Jan 89 08:53:23 PST
This was sent to me by a friend who works at DEC.  What I find notable
about this story is the linkage between selling personal information in
government databases to anyone who asks and legitimate law enforcement
activities.   It seems in this case it is felt you cannot limit the first
without hampering the other.   I can't tell from this account whether that
is a technical consequence of the way the database works, follows from the 
legalities somehow, or is just a misconception.

- Jon Jacky, University of Washington

------- Forwarded Message

    From THE BOSTON GLOBE, January 22, 1989, p.30

                  Registry Can Share Data With Police

    The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles may continue to give
    computerize information to law enforcement agencies, at least
    until there is a final ruling on a privacy suit challenging that
    practice, the Massachusetts Appeals court has ruled.

    The Appeals Court action modified an injunction issue last week by
    Superior Court Judge Joseph Mitchell. At issue is a challenge to a
    decades old Registry practice of which most holders of driver's
    licenses were not aware. For a small fee, the Registry has sold
    information about Massachusetts motorists, including Social
    Security numbers, to private businesses and anyone else who
    asked. The Registry - which has perhaps the largest computerized
    data base in the state - also routinely shares data with hundreds
    of law enforcement agencies and with registries in other states.

    Citizens concerned about privacy filed suit against the Registry
    almost four years ago in Middlesex Superior court to block
    dissemination of their social security numbers and other personal
    data. Judge William Welch threw the case out on the grounds that
    the data collected and stored by the agency are "a public record."
    But in September, the Appeals court disagreed and gave the
    registry 60 days to show in Superior court why the information
    should not be kept confidential.

    Last week, in Middlesex Superior Court Judge Mitchell issued a
    permanent injunction declaring the registry's information about a
    motorist's age, height or Social Security number "personal data"
    that may not be disclosed.  The registry was banned from
    "distributing, offering, selling or making available" the data to
    anyone outside the registry. That ruling alarmed state officials
    who said it would cripple law enforcement efforts if the registry
    could not share information with police agencies. 

    The attorney general's office, representing the registry, warned
    that the agency would have no choice but to disconnect completely
    from the Criminal Justice Information System, which is connected
    to 500 Massachusetts and local police agencies. The system handles
    125,000 requests a day for information - 25,000 involving Registry
    data.

    "If the permanent injunction is not stayed, there would no
    effective enforcement of the motor vehicle laws within this state
    of any other state," testified Peter Larkowich, general counsel to
    the state agency that runs the information system. Without the
    data, he said, police could not identify motorists who cause or
    witness accidents and could not issue tickets "with any degree of
    certainty." 

    Robert Hernandez, the attorney representing the citizens in the
    privacy suit, said his clients did not want to appear to be "cop
    killers", so they negotiated a partial stay of Mitchell's ruling.
    "Basically, the feeling was that no judge was going to allow
    something to go on that would endanger the lives of law enforcement
    officers," Hernandez said. He said the registry would now have to
    warn motorists seeking a new license or renewing an old one that
    some of the information will be available to police. The registry
    will also have to inform motorists that they can request a
    randomly chosen number for their license number rather than their
    Social Security number.

    The Appeals Court also said it would hear appeals from the citizens
    and the Registry on an expedited schedule.


Dead Code Maintenance

Douglas Jones <jones@herky.cs.uiowa.edu>
Tue, 31 Jan 89 13:04:56 CST
One of the benefits I get from living in Iowa City is that many of my students
have worked for one or the other of the local divisions of Rockwell
International.  One of them, who had worked for the Government Avionics
Division, on the Global Positioning System project related the following tale
to me:

Global Positioning System receivers are boxes that use information broadcast
by a system of satelites to deduce the latitude, longitude, and altitude of
the receiver.  These boxes are built into a variety of weapons systems now
in use by the United States and its allies.  The box contains a radio receiver
to listen to the satelites, and a fairly powerful computer to interpret the
radio signals.

The computers in the current production GPS receivers are programmed in Jovial,
although a new generation programmed in Ada will no doubt appear someday.  My
student was part of one of the teams that maintained the GPS code.  After
some time on the job, he began to realize that the code his team maintained
was never executed and had never been executed in the memory of any team
member.  That is, an entire team of programmers was being paid to maintain
dead code.  Despite the fact that the code was dead, the team was required to
produce the entire range of documents supporting each release of the code, and
they were required to react to various engineering change requests.

Not too surprisingly, my student became demoralized and left the company, but
not before learning enough to make the following hypothesis about how his
situation had come to be.

He guesses that, once upon a time, there was a prototype GPS system where his
module actually served some purpose and came to be executed from time to time.
The structure of this system was presumably used to define Rockwell's
contractual relationship to the Department of Defense, and as a result, his
module gained a legal standing that was quite independent of its function in
the GPS system.

As time passed, the actual calls to procedures in his module were eliminated
from the GPS system, for one reason or another, until the code was dead.  At
first, nobody knew it was dead.  The project was big enough that it wasn't
uncommon for the people working on one module to have at best infrequent
communication with those who called the procedures in the module, and
engineering change notices that required changes to the module kept everybody
busy.

Engineering change notices would not have arrived if the actual structure of
the program were used to determine who needed to participate in a change.  In
fact, the notices were distributed based on many other criteria, including the
contractual descriptions of the modules.  The team was quite busy keeping their
code up with the changes, testing changes using locally developed scaffolding,
and waiting for any report of failures from the global system tests.

The discovery that the code was dead appears to have resulted from its passing
global system tests even when it was obviously in error.  Once my student found
that the code was dead, he asked his managers why his efforts were being
waisted on it.  Their answer was that it was less expensive to maintain dead
code than it was to rewrite the contract with the Department of Defense to
eliminate the job.

Douglas W. Jones, Department of Computer Science, University of Iowa


Re: Structured Programming

Eric Roskos <roskos@ida.org>
Wed, 1 Feb 89 09:45:05 EST
> What REALLY happens when a group of structured programmers tries to
> develop a large program? Usually they argue about how the program should
> be indented, what the comments should be like, how the subroutines
> should be nested, ...  etc. 

If one believes that this is what "structured programming" is about, it
is no wonder that there are such problems with it. 

I wish I could give you some "war stories" about unstructured vs. 
programming, but unfortunately, all the software I've worked on has been
proprietary, and I've only encountered a few insightful people who could
tell from the outside which of the very large-selling software packages
was internally well-structured, and which wasn't.  Suffice to say that
often there is a strong correlation between how easily a program can be
adapted to meet new requirements and host system enhancements, and how
well-structured the program is.  Often it shows in the product
architecture (how the features visible to the user interrelate) too. 

There are at least two problems.  First, "structured programming" seems
to be one of those things you can learn only through experience; you
discover it slowly through years of practice, during which time some the
things that are taught as "structured programming" start to make some
sense, but only as a superficial veneer over what's really involved. 
Second, the sentiment expressed in the original article that "structured
programming" is a bad thing in the development environment is
widespread, and the disasters which result (which are very real to those
who have had to maintain large programs) are often covered over by the
developers, so that they are unknown on the outside.  Sometimes a
carefully-worded manual or an assortment of appealing new features can
hide irreparable flaws in a program.  Problems can result because, for
instance, a programmer hardcoded a machine-specific feature throughout a
several hundred thousand line program instead of isolating it in one
place.  Or because the code was made dependent throughout on the size of
some data structure which was always referenced with a hard-coded constant
offset rather than using some more "structured" reference.  There are a
lot of examples of this sort of problem, which has nothing to do with
whether the program is "provably correct" or with how widely it sells.
But it does have a significant bearing on how long the program will last
without having to be rewritten.

Lately there seem to be new paradigms emerging (such as "object-oriented
programming") which are intended to make some of these principles more obvious.
They seem to have pros and cons, particularly in terms of efficiency, but
perhaps the fact that there is so much programming to be done, and so few
really experienced programmers out there, makes it necessary that some
easier-to-understand concept take the place of "structured programming" for the
most part.  Just as there are not very many really well-designed products of
any sort, there are not very many well-structured programs, and thus people
tend to blame "structured programming" for what is, in reality, simply bad
programming in a superficially neat and tidy style.

Eric Roskos, IDA (roskos@CS.IDA.ORG or Roskos@DOCKMASTER.ARPA)


Random Thoughts on Redundancy

<Boebert@DOCKMASTER.ARPA>
Wed, 25 Jan 89 14:22 EST
From "Flight" magazine, many years ago:  The Chairman of Rolls-Royce [which
makes aircraft engines] was asked why he always flew the Atlantic in
four-engined aircraft.  His reply:  "Because there are no five-engined
aircraft." The same magazine once noted that a mechanical engineer looks out an
aircraft window, sees four engines, and relaxes with a drink; the expert on
fuel contamination looks at the same sight and tightens his or her seat belt.
So maybe the only fundamental truth is that we are all prisoners of our
metaphors, and never more so than in the software business.

On a less philosophical note, people interested in the issue of engine
redundancy might find it worthwhile to look up the chapter in "Spirit of
St.  Louis" where Lindbergh presents the tradeoffs that led him to
choose a single-engined aircraft for his attempt.

To get an idea of how such tradeoffs go, first consider my experience in
working on the software design for a generic triple-redunant autopilot,
where I discovered that 85% of the logic was in redundancy management.
This is a step forward in reliability?

Then look at the Honeywell autopilot for the Saab JA37b fighter.  This
was, as far as I have been able to tell, the first digital fly-by-wire
system ever put in an operational aircraft.  It was a single-channel
system, with flight-critical functions backed up in the air data
computer, and analyzed to a fare-thee-well (Honeywell had to *demo* that
all possible short circuits between two arbitrary pins resulted in an
orderly transition to the backup mode).  Last I heard a couple of
hundred of them had been flying for over a decade without incident.  So
redundant is neat, but simple and well-understood ain't bad either.


One last word about probabilities

Dr Robert Frederking <ref@ztivax.siemens.com>
Wed, 1 Feb 89 17:59:14 -0100
At great personal RISK to my ego, let me suggest that nobody has gotten the
numbers right yet, even ignoring questions of whether independence, etc.,
holds in this case.  For a three engine plane, where p is the probability of
failure,
    P(all three fail) = p**3
    P(any 2 fail) = 3p**2(1-p)
    P(any 1 fails) = 3p(1-p)**2
    P(none fail) = (1-p)**3
This has the rather important property that all the probabilities add to 1.
The key is to realize that the plane can be in eight states with respect to
engine failure, each state's P is obtained by multiplication, and you add
together all states that are essentially equivalent (differing only in which
engine(s) are out).  Thus
    P(crashing) = 3p**2-2p**3, if it can fly on 2 engines.

Similarly for two engines,
    P(both fail) = p**2
    P(one fails) = 2p(1-p)
    P(none fail) = (1-p)**2
which also happily adds to 1.
    P(one or both out) = 2p-p**2, which (I believe) is always bigger.

As an aside, as I understand it, the FAA requires all airliners in the US to
have more than one engine, and to be able to fly to a safe landing with one
out.

    Robert Frederking       ARPA: ref%ztivax@siemens.siemens.com
    Siemens AG/ZFE F2 INF 23     or : unido!ztivax!ref@uunet.UU.NET
    Otto-Hahn-Ring 6        UUCP: ...!unido!ztivax!ref
    D-8000 Munich 83  West Germany  Phone: (-89) 636 47129


Independence and probabilities

Peter Neumann <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Wed, 1 Feb 1989 10:20:55 PST
It must be remembered throughout that the classical binomial probabilities
assume independence.  Cross-wiring throws that assumption for a loop.
Subsequent to the 8 January crash of the British Midlands Airways 737 (where
speculation still focuses on a wiring defect), FAA inspections have now turned
up cross-wiring in engine or cargo-hold fire warning systems in at least four
other planes.  This is a particularly insidious type of problem, because it
normally would be significant only in time of emergency, and under normal
operation would have no effect (and remain undetected).


Re: Counting engines

Mike Bell <mb@camcon.co.uk>
27 Jan 89 12:39:34 GMT
Of course, an increase in the number of aircraft engines actually
*increases* the chance of catastrophic failure:  if each engine has a
probability p of losing a turbine blade in such a way that fuel lines
are severed and a major fire ensues, then if an aircraft has N engines
the probability of failure is clearly N*p, so a one-engined jet is
clearly safer, and a glider is safer still:-)

And then again, the complexity of systems interconnecting the engines
increases non-linearly:  you can't have cross-wiring faults between
engines on a single-engined aircraft.

The point is simple:  duplicating part of a system doesn't *guarantee* an
improvement in overall safety, and indeed, can reduce it.  ("This nuclear sub
has two reactors so that if one should melt down, the second can...")

-- Mike Bell — <mb@camcon.co.uk>, <mb@camcon.uucp> or even <...!ukc!camcon!mb>


Talk by Roy Saltman on computerized vote tallying

Charles Youman (youman@mitre.org) <m14817@mitre.mitre.org>
Wed, 01 Feb 89 11:14:38 EST
Roy G. Saltman of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(formerly NBS) will be speaking on the topic "Accuracy, Integrity, and
Security in Computerized Vote Tallying" at the February meeting of the
Washington, DC Chapter ACM.  The meeting will be held on Thursday,
February 16, 1989, at the Rosslyn Holiday Inn, 1850 North Fort Myer Drive,
Arlington, Virginia.  The talk will begin at 8:00 p.m.  There is an optional
dinner preceding the talk which starts at 7:00 p.m.  Reservations are 
required only for the dinner (cost $14) and can be made by calling
(202) 659-2319 by noon on Tuesday, February 14.

The talk summarizes an extensive report on this subject recently published
by Mr. Saltman at NIST.  The talk concerns protections against manipulation
and fraud in the use of computer programs and hardware in computerized
vote tallying.  Recommendations concerning hardware, software, operational
procedures, and internal control concepts are presented.

                     [Saltman's excellent report was cited in RISKS-7.52.  PGN]

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