The 'malignant genie' problem
Years ago, the venerable Kevin Fealey posed the following prompt as an 'ice-breaker' to a gathering of us security engineers —
Imagine a malignant genie. You can wish for anything, but the genie will take it in the worst way possible. Your challenge is to craft a wish that can't be twisted against you.
I don't know who to properly attribute this to besides Kevin, but as my memory serves, he had acknowledged that someone else once shared "the malignant genie problem" with him. I've since repeated this pretty much verbatim to others occasionally.
Only after some curious Google-ing and Perplexity Pro searching this morning did I realize this isn't an official "thing" (?), unless you widen scope to The Monkey's Paw and so on.
My expectation was to find this somewhere represented more akin to the problem of two emperors, Moore's Law, Jevons paradox, Doppler effect, or something.
Below is the closest "malignant genie" reference I was able to find, sort of like this, for what it's worth —
/r/learnprogramming 🤔
Here's my own higher-production-value take on it —
Thought Exercise: The Malignant Genie
Imagine you are an intrepid security engineer who has just stumbled upon an ancient, dusty lamp in the depths of your company's server room. As you rub the lamp, a malignant genie appears, ready to grant you one wish. However, this genie is notorious for twisting wishes in the worst possible ways.
Scenario: You can wish for anything, but the genie will interpret your wish in the most malevolent manner possible. For example, if you wish for a million dollars, the genie might give you gold bars that are stolen, leading to legal troubles.
Your Task:
- Threat Modeling: Identify potential threats and vulnerabilities in your wish. Consider how the genie might twist your words and the consequences of those twists.
- Resilient Engineering Principles: Apply principles of resilient engineering to design a wish that is tamperproof. Think about redundancy, fail-safes, and clear, unambiguous language.
- What-Could-Possibly-Go-Wrong: Brainstorm all the ways your wish could go wrong and how to mitigate those risks.
Exercise: Craft a wish that is as tamperproof as possible. Explain your thought process, the threats you identified, and the resilient engineering principles you applied. Discuss how you mitigated potential risks and ensured the wish could not be twisted by the malignant genie.
Example: "I wish for a secure, legally obtained, and fully traceable transfer of one million dollars to my personal bank account, without causing harm or legal issues to myself or others, and ensuring all taxes and fees are paid."
If this isn't already an established prompt (??), we can together dub it The Malignant Genie Problem here and now.
With title case and everything, to transcend the eventual demise of this blog and my fleshy body, whichever shall come first. 🙂