IRAN NUKESFast 16 Malware Aimed at Undermining Proliferant State Nuclear Weapons Programs, Iran was a Credible Target
The Fast 16 malware looks to be targeting a nuclear weapon program’s hydrodynamic calculation group working on implosion systems using weapon-grade uranium as the nuclear explosive material.
We performed this analysis in collaboration with Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team and Kim Zetter, with whom we had collaborated years ago on the Stuxnet malware. They published their analyses in two separate reports that can be found here and here.
Our collaboration with Symantec and Kim Zetter developed after Sentinel One publicly revealed the Fast16 malware, which is dated to about 2005 and was a multi-year sustained operation. The malware looks to be targeting a nuclear weapon program’s hydrodynamic calculation group working on implosion systems using weapon-grade uranium as the nuclear explosive material.
Fast 16 targets the LS DYNA and AUTODYN software and specifically manipulates the values during simulations of explosively driven compressions of very dense materials. These software packages are very useful and capable to model the whole hydrodynamic process starting with the detonation of the high explosives, the development of a shock wave accelerating a high density metal flyer plate that strikes the core with tremendous force, causing compression of a central dense core to very high pressures and temperatures, exactly the hydrodynamic process in an implosion-type, solid core, levitated design, common to many early nuclear weapons programs. The software packages enable the solution and characterization of a very difficult problem involving full transient physics of matter under extreme compression. It turns an extremely fast, and opaque physical process into a fully resolved, designable system, with an exact geometry, driver, and timing that produces the pressure, density, and uniformity desired.
Although the malware looks first for specific high explosive equation of state (EOS) packages in either LS DYNA or AUTODYN, that seems just to be a first step in locating a worthwhile target, or a way to narrow its search. The ultimate target is a material being compressed that is far denser than the high explosive materials and far denser than the metals commonly studied in commercial applications of LS DYNA and AUTODYN.
