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Pi In The Sky As ESA Starts Testing Encrypted Comms On International Space Station

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the flip-a-coin dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The European Space Agency (ESA) unveiled an experiment it hopes will overcome the problems that prevent encrypted communications between the Earth and orbiting spacecraft.

The Cryptographic ICE Cube, launched into orbit in April as part of the NG-11 mission, has been installed on the ISS' Columbus laboratory and is currently being controlled from the ground by researchers in the Netherlands.

ESA says the experiment has recently begun to return data that will be analyzed and shared with CERN. Full testing will begin later in August and is scheduled to run for at least a year.

The aim of the mission, says ESA software product assurance engineer Emmanuel Lesser, is to overcome the hurdles that solar radiation presents for encrypted communications. Specifically, the way encryption keys can be scrambled when radiation hits the memory chips doing the communicating while on orbital spacecraft.

"In orbit the problem has been that space radiation effects can compromise the key within computer memory causing ‘bit-flips’," he explained .

"This disrupts the communication, as the key on ground and the one in space no longer match. Up to now this had been a problem that requires dedicated, and expensive, rad-hardened devices to overcome."

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:18PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:18PM (#874149) Journal

    So is the ISS now "going dark" by using encrypted communications that the NSA is unable to snoop on?

    So several nations and the ESA are doing this hard work to ensure that encrypted communications overcome the problems described. (due to solar radiation) To expend such resources, they must really think that, at least sometimes, they have something private they want to communicate. Despite the taxpayers.

    So if encryption is good enough for them, then why isn't it good enough for everyone else? For Banks? For Credit Cards? For Amazon? For Backpage?

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:39PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:39PM (#874154)

    It is more basic than all that because in space there is no easy set of cartesian coordinates to use, how can you have a backdoor when you don't even know where the back is??

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @04:00AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @04:00AM (#874475)

      I'd tell you to shove it right now, but I'm assuming you don't know where your own backdoor is either.