Computer And Network Security

This teaches us a very important lesson about computer security — the more secure a system is, the more difficult it is to access, even by the people who designed it. Developers sometimes create back-doors in their own software to make it easier to access the root system. This Dr. Falken's backdoor is an important plot element in Wargames because it allows Lightman to "play a game" with the WOPR that results in escalation of the US' nuclear alert system to DEFCON 1.

What makes the security flaws of the WOPR system so severe is that none of the system engineers working in NORAD were aware of the flaws. Dr. Falken developed software that could play games against itself, a feature that we now know as machine learning. This is a cutting edge technology today that is being used to develop artificial intelligence, but in 1983 it was hardly known and certainly not understood well by anyone except the experts. Dr. Falken's work was not intended to be used in a real wartime scenario, since he was primarily a researcher, but his self learning games were still incorporated into NORAD's program, especially Global Thermonuclear War. Before Lightman came along, Falken was the only one with the ability to access the simulation from outside the network, since he was the only one aware of the internal functions of the system and the back-door that he created.