Mission: Impossible films are always a lot of fun, and the seventh, latest instalment Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part 1, which came out in UK cinemas yesterday, is just as engaging and exhilarating as the previous films, not to mention incredibly timely, given recent news events.
Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt, who in 2023 is still completing missions for the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) — no, not the International Monetary Fund, the other one — but this time he faces off against a mysterious, sentient, all-powerful artificial intelligence (AI) intent on controlling the world, which calls itself “the Entity”.
But how does the technology in MI7 stack up? Here’s the down-low from The Standard and some technical experts.
Warning: Contains spoilers
Sentient artificial intelligence
In MI7, someone has built a terrifying new weapon that threatens all humanity — a “godless, stateless, amoral” AI that is able to be everywhere and nowhere at once, plus has the ability to twist and manipulate information to its will. Every government wants to control and weaponise this AI but, to do so, you need two halves of an intricate key — and so the race begins.
Even better, the AI is so powerful that it has a henchman working for it called Gabriel (Esai Morales) and is able to both give him instructions and create havoc by itself.
But is it possible for AI to be self-aware, and have the ability to experience emotions or push an agenda, such as self-protection or greed? Computer scientists overwhelmingly say no.
Sandra Wachter, a professor of technology and regulation at Oxford University, thinks the general public has gotten generative AI confused with artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a far-off, fantastical concept about sentient self-aware robots, like the murderous Skynet in the Terminator films.
“There is no scientific evidence that we are on a pathway to sentiency. There is not even evidence that such a pathway does exist,” Prof Wachter tells The Standard.
In particular, she takes a dim view of “scaremongering” views by some politicians and figures in the AI industry, who claim that AI could end up setting off nuclear warheads or be used to build “dirty bomb” chemical weapons in the next two years.
“The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence... I cannot warn you about something and respond if I don’t know what the harms are. However, there is scientific evidence that AI causes harm such as bias, data protection violation or misinformation. We should focus on issues that already exist.”
Hacking facial recognition and augmented-reality glasses
In MI7, US intelligence tries to locate Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) at Abu Dhabi Airport using facial-recognition software, but every time they think that they have found him, it turns out to be someone else — a handy trick pulled off by Hunt’s pals Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames).
Meanwhile, The Entity handily steps in at will to scrub Gabriel’s image from the live video footage, even hacking into the augmented-reality (AR) glasses worn by Ethan and impersonating other voices to trick him.
The software shown in the movie is used by police worldwide today — though not in AR glasses — and deepfake technology is thriving online, including AI videos featuring Tom Cruise himself. But many experts told The Standard we don’t have the advanced computing power shown in MI7.
“It’s certainly possible to adapt CCTV footage to change people’s faces and voices... and it’s also possible to obscure faces of the most wanted; however, we’re some way away from being able to make such changes in real-time,” says Laura Kankaala, threat intelligence lead at Finland-based IT security firm F-Secure.
“The amount of computational resources required to do this in real-time is crazy.”
On the other hand, Darren James, senior product manager at US password management firm Specops Software, thinks deep fakes have progressed: “With advances in network speed, compression, CPU, and graphics processing, we’ve also seen a huge jump in deepfake videos being able to change your face and voice in near real-time. So, if you have the technology, know-how, and money, this is very doable.”
Simon Newman, a member of International Cyber Expo’s Advisory Council, says work on AR glasses is progressing, but there are a lot of privacy concerns, so you probably won’t be able to look up passersby on the street and see if they have a criminal record.
“That said, augmented-reality glasses do offer the potential for normal consumers to make use of this technology — it will be possible to recognise friends on social media and bring their profile pages up on screen.”
But others think we should forget about AR headsets coming any time soon.
“One nail-biting watch of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part 1 and you’d be forgiven for thinking AR headsets or goggles really are the next big thing, especially when Apple launched its mainstream AR headset last month, too. However, in reality, we’re not that much further on than we were in 2013, with the launch and flop of Google Glass,” Michael Queenan, chief executive of London-based data services firm Nephos Technologies tells The Standard.
“There aren’t any affordable mainstream models yet. That’s why Google Glass failed but step counters and fitness trackers became mainstream. There needs to be a great experience for a great price that doesn’t involve walking around with a computer on your head.
“Neither Apple nor Meta are on the mark just yet. At the moment, AR and VR headsets are just for the gaming community, there is no practical use for them.”
Biometrics
One famous trope from the Mission: Impossible films is the super-realistic latex masks used by IMF agents to impersonate other people. In MI7, a handy machine in a briefcase can create one of these masks very quickly.
There is an interesting scene, however, where Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), disguised as someone else, passes through a biometric scanner at a US government building. Okay, so perhaps in this world masks can fool facial biometric scanners, but how does he beat hand scanners?
Today, we scan people’s hands because the subcutaneous blood vessels of the human body form a distinctive vein pattern for each person.
According to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), it is highly unlikely that in real life you could get through a biometric hand scanner using your own hands.
Mr Newman says some biometric scanners have been spoofed by testers using fake prosthetic fingers, “however, modern scanners can now detect whether the finger is ‘alive’ or not, so perhaps this one will be less common in the future”.
Seamless internet anywhere so you can hack people
Many people, including myself, can’t get a 4G signal on the go, whether in London or in rural parts of the UK, yet Ving Rhames’s Luther and Simon Pegg’s Benji are able to hack into systems, communicate with Ethan, and monitor him using everything from wi-fi, to 5G, to even, apparently, piggybacking off satellites in Space.
At one point, Benji is even able to monitor Ethan on a motorbike going over a cliff while sitting in the passenger seat of a car on autopilot moving across Helsetkopen, in Norway. Surely this one is a dud, but experts disagree.
“Absolutely, this is completely possible today, thanks to global satellite internet services and ubiquitous mobile communications. If you’re in a basement or bunker, though, you may need another plan… in fact, at the Def Con conference in Las Vegas this summer, there will be a satellite-hacking competition,” says Matt Aldridge, a principal solutions consultant, at Canadian software firm OpenText’s cybersecurity arm.
Air gapping
I almost fell off my chair in shock on hearing Cary Elwes, who plays National Security Agency (NSA) boss Denlinger in MI7, ask on-screen why air gapping, a cybersecurity technique often mentioned by academics, can’t be used to prevent the AI from spreading to the US’s most critical infrastructure.
Air gapping is a method of keeping computers and IT networks safe by making sure they are physically isolated from other computers and the internet. It’s simple — if your machine isn’t connected to anything, how can it fall foul to malware or rogue AIs?
However, the idea of an AI that can go anywhere is an exciting one, and experts are divided.
“An air gap is a physical space between an IT resource and a network. With all radio signals like wi-fi disabled, it’s tough to circumvent. Whilst it has been proven that input / output can be perceived through minute fluctuations in power consumption, and even visually through the faint flicker of an LED light, the Mission: Impossible team are going to be hard-pressed to find any intelligence, artificial or otherwise, to make this work… at least in this dimension,” says Steven Wood, director of solutions consulting at OpenText’s cybersecurity division.
Manchester-based IT security firm NCC Group disagrees, although admits there is no known real-world example of such an attack.
“Even an air-gapped system needs to be updated, and USB drives are often used. As for exfiltrating sensitive data, there have been some academic papers and proofs of concept about using the internal fans or SATA cables to communicate via ultrasonic or electromagnetic waves,” NCC Group’s technical director Sourya Biswas tells The Standard.
Michael Langer, chief product officer of Israeli industrial cybersecurity firm Radiflow, is still scared about what AI could do: “Most [air-gapping] techniques are only occurring at an academic level rather than actually in industry, as they require very deep knowledge of physics, cybersecurity, and electrical engineering.
“However, generative AI in the near future will probably be able to assemble these techniques and perform some working combination of them to provide hackers with ’simplified’ access to various state-of-the-art hacking capabilities.”
And could an AI somehow get into a Russian submarine sitting at the bottom of the sea?
“AI can go anywhere — there just needs to be some form of connectivity and initial compromise to enable it; either back when the submarine was in port and it sat dormant, or via some communication link when the sub surfaces to reach back home,” Toby Lewis, global head of threat analysis at London-based cybersecurity firm Darktrace explains.
But Mr James of Specops Software totally disagrees. He says submarines specialise in avoiding detection and so communication between headquarters and military submarines is severely limited.
“Therefore, compromising that communication blackout and having the systems in place to attack a military-grade computer system to allow AI to infect the sonar system is probably very unlikely — makes a great movie storyline, though,” he says.
