Saturday, July 4, 2015

185. Profession: Security-Ecologist

One of the strategies of the Planetary Consortium/Autonomist Alliance cold war that is common to both sides is autonomous sabotage. Gremlins are the weapons of choice, designed to disrupt the enemies actions, slow their economy, and waste their resources. An arms race has developed, each side attempting to develop countermeasures to the other's gremlins while seeking to design new gremlins that will overcome their enemies new countermeasures. Many gremlins are capable of reproducing, and many others are designed by automatic evolutionary algorithms. Their countermeasures are themselves often self-reproductive and designed by automatic evolutionary algorithms. On some autonomist stations they are set up to deliberately mimic predator-prey relationships, with bots preying on gremlins and allowed to reproduce themselves according to their success.

This cycle is repeated with almost any widespread and actively used security system. The gremlin ecologies develop relatively slowly, being bound by physical replication, but software is relatively unhindered; it is common wisdom that you should re-install your mesh security software regularly before it develops into something incomprehensible. The results of the arms race and automated evolution is often best modeled as an ecological system, and neither side has full knowledge of what has developed.

Specialized in the complex relationships that form between automated, self-improving security systems and their aggressors, security-ecologists are trained first and foremost to be able to identify the roles of unique security systems and their roles within the ecological system that has developed, and then to exploit that knowledge in the pursuit of either shoring up security or defeating it.

Mechanics

Profession: Security-Ecologist can be taken as a knowledge skill.

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