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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: 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?)