© ISTOCK.COM/LAREMENKODNA could be used to hack into computers, according to researchers at the University of Washington. Published at the 2017 USENIX Security Symposium, the team’s paper describes a method to encode malware in DNA that, when sequenced and read by a computer, grants remote access to an outside user—albeit on a deliberately weakened system.
“We know that if an adversary has control over the data a computer is processing, it can potentially take over that computer,” study coauthor Tadayoshi Kohno tells Wired. “That means when you’re looking at the security of computational biology systems, you’re not only thinking about the network connectivity and the USB drive and the user at the keyboard but also the information stored in the DNA they’re sequencing.”
In the current study, the researchers wrote malware that would give an attacker remote access to an infected computer. They then translated this code into binary, and from there into a sequence of the bases A, C, T, and G, to be synthesized into DNA.
When a computer read the data after the DNA had been sequenced, ...
