I recently finished reading the Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll.  This one has been on my list for a while, when my friend Cam recommended it many years ago.  It somehow never made it to my list because, well, it’s not science fiction, and I used to have a lot less time to read.  But, when I saw Cliff Stoll on Numberphile, I remembered the book and decided to pick it up – I’m quite glad I did.

I think the most interesting thing, to me, was just how Cliff Stoll monitored his hacker – by putting a printer in-line between the hacker’s entry point and his target.  This sort of man-in-the-middle monitoring is still possible in some cases, but our protocols have gotten much more sophisticated, that this was almost laughable.  Similarly, in an age where almost all traffic is encrypted end-to-end, this kind of technique would no longer work (unless said encryption were compromised).

Leading off with this simple monitoring made the rest of the book extremely fascinating, as Cliff used so many different techniques to learn more about and even hamper his unwelcome guest.  From the psychology of learning how the hacker acted helping him pin down his skills, to the physics of adding noise to the wire, to computing ping times for file downloads – that he logged and aggregated all this information was really interesting to read about.   Coupled with his ability to write with such detail about the event makes the rest really quite amazing.

The play and counterplay between the Cliff and the hacker was so fascinating because Cliff held all the cards while the hacker was using his system – he knew every trick the hacker had, could monitor every keystroke, and knew everything he did, but he didn’t know who he was, where he was coming from, or what he was after.  This, combined with the fact that Cliff could lock the hacker out of his system pretty easily, but only if he was willing to go without answers to these questions, made the chase that much more interesting.

Finally, I really enjoyed this book for its coming of age story – this was unexpected and a really fulfilling arc.  As Cliff grew to learn more about the people who make up the three letter acronyms of government, I think he grew to understand the human component, and see them as people rather than stereotypes.  He also grew to understand the value of what they did, even if they didn’t grok what was needed.

Overall, I really liked this book – I’m quite happy that I got the chance to read it, and got the excellent recommendation, even if it took me quite a while to act upon it.  I would give this four-and-a-half Klein bottle-shaped network switches – awesome if it’s your thing, and still pretty cool otherwise.  I recommend it to anyone who is interested in true-stories about computer networks and mysteries.