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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

> 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...

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.

> 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 ??

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