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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."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snow on Thursday August 01 2019, @05:36PM (3 children)
Use multiple memory banks to store the keys/current state. Mirror the banks to each other. If one goes out of whack, bring it back in line. If you have 3-4 banks, it should be pretty reliable.
Maybe the overhead is too much? I don't know... it seems like a pretty easy problem to solve in the grand scheme of things.
Then I read the article, and that's basically exactly what they are going to do. Why is this a new idea? It seems obvious.
(Score: 1) by noelhenson on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:03PM
ECC memory?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:23PM
Indeed - if you can't trust your memory, you keep the data in redundant backups, ideally encoded with some sort of error-correcting (or at least detecting) code so that you can tell which copy(s) have been corrupted. And then you check for corruption on a regular basis (e.g. before and after every use)
If you're primarily concerned with radiation-induced bit-flips you don't even need multiple memory banks, I don't think there's much to be gained by storing the data on different physical sticks of RAM - there's very little that will flip more than one bit at a time, and even a high-energy particle cascade is unlikely to actually effect more than a very small physical area on a RAM chip. So long as the redundant copies are scattered throughout memory so that they're physically separated in RAM they shouldn't be significantly more vulnerable than with multiple sticks.
Though, redundant banks of RAM might simplify a hardware implementation that would apply to *all* data in RAM while being completely invisible to software (a RAID-1 RAM controller?)
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Friday August 02 2019, @02:33AM
There's a whole pile of WTFs around this which indicates it's more someone at the ESA playing than any real experiment. Firstly, if you're going to do something like this then you run a hardware and software combination that's likely to endure in that environment, e.g. a TMS570 + FreeRTOS, not a toy like the Pi with Linux that has enough trouble staying running on earth, let alone in space.
Secondly, to test this you don't need to put it into orbit, you just need a suitable source of radiation, e.g. a hospital Co60 source which is how we test our gear, where you can vary the parameters and see how different things work out. "Put it in orbit and see what happens" isn't an evaluation, it's more a "we can put stuff into orbit, what about this?".