ASW Episode 236
An Empathy Test
Hello Protocols, Packets, Programs, and Replicants,
You’re in appsec, walking along in the code, when all of a sudden you look down…,
It doesn’t make any difference what appsec, it’s completely hypothetical.
You look down and see a program. It’s crawling toward you…
You reach down and you flip the program over on its back.
The program lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.
Why is that?
In Bladerunner, the Voight-Kampf test is designed to elicit an emotional response. It’s designed to test empathy, with the implication that doing so can distinguish between humans and replicants – what the Tyrell Corporation bills as more human than human.
The incept date for one of the replicants in the movie, Leon Kowalski, was April 10, 2017.
Happy birthday, Leon. I got you a tortoise.
As a bit of appsec history, we mentioned Heartbleed in the news segment. It dates back to April 7, 2014. It was an easy vuln to exploit and stressed out teams who had to scramble to update services and rotate keys. At the time, I was still deep in C++ and wrote a tool and blog post to demonstrate the vuln.