Europe’s agenda for undersea internet cables | Hacker News Reader

Europe’s agenda for undersea internet cables

euractiv.com

131 pointswalterbell67 comments

I wondered if traffic between the UK and Europe ran through the Channel Tunnel - which would be much harder to surreptitiously cut without being noticed and yes 80% of traffic does:

> Approximately 80 percent of the Internet traffic which runs between the UK and mainland Europe today travels through the Channel Tunnel

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/colt-completes-th...

Props to that article for finding the gloomiest picture of the English station of the Eurotunnel. Brexit has been hard but it's not a nuclear winter just yet.

That looks like it's straight out of Children Of Men. I guess a picture from St. Pancras wouldn't quite have the same punch.

To be fair, the Folkestone terminal is quite... functional.

England is very into that retro-Soviet palette.

Many people for some reason believe that Brutalism was a Soviet invention but no, it originated in the post-WW2 Britain and spread from there.

It was heavily influenced from outside Britain though, particularly Le Corbusier

Brutalist architecture; quite possibly the worst thing come out of post-WW2 Britain, just behind Piers Morgan.

Yeah there’s a 1GW cable that runs through it for power transmission too

Darn it, it's just short by 0.21GW.

There are two risks: evesdropping and an enemy cutting your fiber.

Evesdropping should be protected against by encrypting everything. Have a device sampling traffic over the link and publishing anything found in cleartext. Embarrass users into encrypting their stuff. Then, on top of that, do point to point encryption of the data stream (which is super cheap to do - in fact nearly all high speed links do data 'whitening', which is encryption with a well known key - just encrypt with a secret key instead).

Resistance against the enemy cutting the fiber should just be to have lots of connectivity. Hard to cut 50 links all at once.

If cables are cut you can bet the US will retaliate which is why it hasn’t happened. You can also bet there are plenty of undocumented cables.

However I do wonder if we should just focus of getting space laser communications working to avoid some of these ground infrastructure issues, it seems much easier to cut wires than blow up space craft.

You can only retaliate if you can attribute the attack first and that might not be possible 100% of the time.

The reason why this happened yet is because it isn't very benefitial for the effort it would take. Any rouge state actor can use the Internet in their enemy territory for far more impacting operations (e.g. propaganda, psy ops).

Terrorism would be a more realistic thing, but terrorists don't typically have submarines.

+1 Retaliation wrt. to "cyber security incidents" is seldomly a plausible deterrent, exactly because attribution is so hard. Consider a "simple" case like the Nordstream attacks; despite serious efforts there still is no conclusive attribution.

Protection and mitigation are usually much more practical defenses than the threat of retaliation.

You'll not be able to get anywhere near the throughputs that we have with today's fibre communication networks using satellite communications, unless there is some revolutionary breakthrough (and by revolutionary I mean completely changing of how we understand losses in free-space, so extremely unlikely).

This means we will not really use satellite comms instead of fibre. That said there is definitely applications that benefit from optical satellite comms.

But even getting 1% of the throughput is enough to prevent modern life grinding to a halt.

sure - people won't be able to watch netflix, but basic things like credit card processing, sending emails, getting emergency alerts out, ordering an uber, etc. would all work fine with a 99% reduction in bandwidth.

To cripple a countries infrastructure, you need to cut 100%. And satellite links mean you can no longer do that.

> sending emails

you had better hope people stop using modern webmails then, have you seen how insanely huge those pages are? we'd have to sit for HOURS to download them at dialup speeds

They want to style every element four different ways. Hello World marketing emails are like 70kb. Reminds me of the days of Microsoft frontpage.

I remember in the mid 90s a fellow intern scratching his head about why a short video clip he'd emailed to his school hadn't made it through - it eventually did, but took about 36 hours to send through the local OpenMail -> internet gateway. Every other email out the door did as well.

I think you seriously unterestimate the amount of data society uses to function. If e.g. Australia would suddenly go to only 1% of it's throughput it would cause economic chaos and likely cause hyperinflation amongst many things. Too many things rely on data essentially being free (the development of data traffic prices over the last 4 decades is absolutely mind blowing), in fact even if data throughput prices would stop dropping that would likely have significant economic impact as business plans rely on those projections.

> To cripple a countries infrastructure, you need to cut 100%.

You could do a lot of damage with a few %, targeted in the right places, such as the so-called operational nets (as opposed to their business/IT nets) used by organisations that run critical national infrastructure. E.g. those that monitor / control power distribution.

In the 90's at one point one of Sprints connections between the US and Northern Europe had a problem, and a lot of traffic was routed south towards backups. The congestion caused made connections to the US nearly impossible but also severely hampered a lot of intra-European traffic for many hours.

While it may not entirely grind to a halt, taking out part of the capacity can still cause a lot of problems.

Possibly there should be emergency scenarios considered. Where government turns off video things (youtube and netflix) in case of major network degradation.

Consider that with a 100x reduction in aggregate bandwidth that many clients currently connected to the internet effectively become DDoS agents.

My MacBook doesnt know to not try for an Xcode update because a fiber link got cut somewhere.

I feel like everything would get congested and stay that way for a very long time.

WiFi will be too slow forever compared to Ethernet until suddenly it isn’t.

People have been saying this literally for 20 years now, yet even the fastest 6E wifi with compatible devices and router can barely break 1Gbps barrier in real life use(for me), and majority of the time I see it's much less than that. I mean it's great seeing real life 300-500mbps over wifi, don't get me wrong, but all this incredibly fancy(and very expensive) tech doesn't seem to beat a basic £5 cable quite yet.

Not to mention, ping, jitter and packet loss are all better with ethernet.

Most users never until you put them in a situation where their performance is dependent of those factors, like gaming.

I feel like they do notice but they blame other parts of the chain first, like their ISP.

You're right - its just too unpredictable. The bit that gets me is the hardware in laptops / devices. Apple seem to take some care in antenna design etc, and appear to be fairly fast / reliable, but many device manufacturers stick in whatever, if you get a link then great, call it a day.

Are you planning on discovering some new laws of physics?

> focus of getting space laser communications

Maybe there's a company in Israel that can help with that. ;)

The US will retaliate if somebody cuts a cable belonging to the EU?

I'd be less surprised if the US were the ones doing the cutting

Considering the NordStreams and that they became a taboo topic in EU, a cut cable would mean a lot of finger-pointing and not much done.

When Shetland had two cuts the other month, disconnecting the entire island, I don't remember any finger pointing

Sometimes things like that are a demo of capabilities.

Countries like to demo their war capabilities to other nations simply as a kinda-threat.

Such demos help stop war happening, so I'm not against them. Wars only happen when two countries believe they will win a war. If one of those countries believes they will lose, they will just admit defeat before any actual fighting happens. If countries are aware of eachothers capabilities, there is less chance that both countries believe they will win.

> If cables are cut you can bet the US will retaliate which is why it hasn’t happened.

What, like Nordstream? The risk is that the US cuts the cable when it benefits them. It is still a risk. Ditto for who is it who is going to be using the cables to spy on people.

> If cables are cut you can bet the US will retaliate

Unless it's the US doing the cutting, of course.

It is claimed that cables are routinely cut and the US and Europe do not take obvious diplomatic nor military action.

This was explored as a major topic in the Scandinavian TV investigation https://www.svtplay.se/uppdrag-granskning-skuggkriget

HP were were working with the british military on laser line of sight communication. If someone breaks the laser beam, you'll know about it. Certainly more secure than cables, but environment is a weak spot, smog, fog, leaves, etc etc.

I might be wrong, but I think with space there’s the potential for a Gravity (2013) style situation though, where if one satellite is blown up the debris could cause a chain reaction and take out a ton of other satellites?

It's called the Kessler syndrome

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

I'd categorize fiber cutting under attacks on business continuity. So do other forms of denial of service attacks, like interfering with power supply. Yes, the easiest way to protect commodity infrastructure is redundancy. And while an instant total blackout is unlikely, continuous strikes are a problem (compare to electricity networks in Ukraine). Redundancy is costly, especially for long cables, where attack surface compounds into the costs.

Eavesdropping is an attack on business safety. So is injecting misinformation or altering messages. For data, encryption (and authentication!) mostly solves these issues at pretty low costs and I think that where this matters it is mostly covered.

You can point-to-point encrypt a single fiber segment at the physical layer. This is what classified networks do and why they're able to use the same public backbones as the Internet, even though most of the traffic is probably also TLS packets to begin with. This way, even the addressing metadata is encrypted.

> Embarrass users into encrypting their stuff.

so, utilize fear of humiliation to coerce people into doing what you think they should be doing?

your methods are wrong even if your goal is well intended, I would bet against you because wrong methods have unintended side effects.

And who is going to do that ? The countries where cables are landing and who benefit the most from that eavesdropping, like the UK (in partnership with the US) and France ??

> Resistance against the enemy cutting the fiber should just be to have lots of connectivity. Hard to cut 50 links all at once.

What if they put explosive devices on those links, then detonated them at once?

Why bother with explosives when you are the one manufacturing/assembling amplifiers? https://www.newsweek.com/chinese-parts-found-us-fighter-show...

Important to note that the EU Commissioner for the Internal Market is an ex Telecom executive by the name of Thierry Breton who has demonstrated willingness in the past for aggressive regulation to help the telecom companies.

As a recent example, he has advocated levying fees on "Over The Top" services, ie Netflix etc that goes into a fund to pay for the Telecom companies investment into infrastructure.

Yes, but the Commission takes decision as a body of 27, not by individual Commissioners. What he might say and what the commission puts forward is different .

Not to mention that the commission in all important matters only makes proposals which are then depending on the topic adopted either by the council (ministers or heads of state of all 27 EU countries) or by council and Parliament.

What does "Over The Top" even mean, why can’t Telecom companies finance themselves, etc

OTT refers to the service being delivered via L3 IP, hence the ISP/Telcom can't block it or charge for it (as they would prefer to in the intests of making more money). So the content is flying "over the top" of their gate.

(Telcos didn't want the internet to exist, with its service neutral model : they wanted to sell "value added" services over their wires).

On one hand, I don't think levying OTT fees make much as telcos ought to have been already paid for the bandwidth.

On the other, I also think OTT companies, and in particular VOD companies like Netflix really have no reason to rely on undersea cables in the first place. Simply put: neither netflix, nor any of their customers are located underwater and 99% of their offering is static content. Which means that distribution necessarily relies on CDNs and it's in everyone's interest (Netflix, the telcos and the customer) to access the copy located nearest to the viewer.

So in principle, content should never be delivered to customers using undersea cables and indeed this typically happens only when people use a VPN (to bypass somewhat silly IP licensing restrictions designed by the content owners).

Netflix needs underseas cables (well, transoceanic links) to serve the critical dynamic content / account state keeping and also to transfer content to CDN nodes. The catalog of content changes regularly.

I cant help but think that any solution will have its vulnerabilities. Therefore redundancy and resiliency in the system design is the best approach.

Bad actors are going act bad no matter which way you go.

Perhaps EU should reclaim the Mediterranean sea and the Baltic sea and turn it into land (perhaps also part of the North sea between UK and EU). That would prevent Russian subs from messing with any cables AND it would protect against flooding due to climate change.

Has there been any evidence of Russian subs messing with undersea internet cables?

Evidence? Not that's been publicly released, at least. Suspicion? Yes.

They have the subs to do it: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/9928/russias-massive-a...

and there've been suspicious cuts: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43828/undersea-cable-c...

It's undoubtedly something they'd (and all the other major powers) plan to do in a wartime scenario.

i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa

Would piss of a lot of coastal landowners that one, across multiple countries. I'm sure the admin would be horrible.

Wow, I'm sure nothing would go wrong when that Gibraltar dam would inevitably break ! (/s)

Of course you don't have to heavily populate the newly reclaimed land for it to be still useful ...

You could over engineer it to be more than just a dam; build any hydro-electric power off of side-canals, and the main dam could be two dams that develop into a full land bridge of considerable girth.

The bit rate is somewhat atrocious at the moment, but I really like the idea that we might one day be able to transmit data straight through the planet using neutrino beams https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221679699_Demonstra...

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33110478

> Another proposal for which the EU would have available funding is the Far North Fiber, an internet cable to connect Scandinavia to Japan via the Arctic to avoid major choke points like the Suez Chanel and the South China Sea, revealed by EURACTIV last October.

But why?

To avoid major choke points like the Suez Chanel and the South China Sea.

For example:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-Spotlight/Asia-s-i...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/submarine-internet-cables-eg...

Is there really so much communication between europe and japan?

NSA & CIA: We will tap those

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