Pacific Fibre cable project sunk by US fears about Chinese espionage | Hacker News Reader

Pacific Fibre cable project sunk by US fears about Chinese espionage

interest.co.nz

57 pointssteve1960 comments

They have some right to block this if they feel there will be espionage, but should have to pay all cost differentials required to not use Chinese equipment and investment. (NSA is welcome to invest, since they'll be wiretapping it anyway, and if European intelligence wants to subsidize ALU to provide equipment, they can have their own monitoring.)

Realistically, any major fiber system is going to be monitored by virtually all intelligence agencies of major powers -- at minimum the US plus the endpoint nations, but I wouldn't be surprised if China, Russia, and maybe eventually other countries established submarine tap technology, either in the middle or at underwater branch/repeater units.

Angry and sad if this kills the project entirely -- I was really looking forward to Pacific Fibre :(

Can you tap fiber? I thought it was only possible to tap underwater cables that emit electromagnetic waves?

You may be able to tap the repeater units.

If you can get access to the cable then it is possible to splice into it using fairly standard techniques. Here [1] is an article from 10 years ago that looks at what was going on back then. There is speculation [2] that the US Navy has submarines equipped with 'splicing chambers' and cable laying equipment for this purpose.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cabl... [2] http://defensetech.org/2005/02/21/jimmy-carter-super-spy/

Wouldn't someone notice if the cable went out of commission for 10 minutes while they spliced?

If your underwater fibre goes down for 10 minutes would international espionage really be the first thing that comes to mind?

If it comes back, then yes. I don't think fiber can have a "loose connection". It either works or it does not.

That may be true of the fiber, but it's not true of the network equipment driving the fiber. Like all computers, these occasionally need hardware or software upgrades too.

You could also arrange for your subsea tapping to be at the same time as an attack (IP or electrical) on the shore station, if you really want it to be difficult to detect. Or do a real cut in one place (with a trawler), while tapping at another place. And possibly cut 5 cables at the same time...

Anyone with real security requirements assumes long-haul cables and the general Internet are monitored. Point to point crypto on links is one of the easier problems to solve.

(the harder problem is doing something once you've tapped -- you either need to build a multi-wave analysis box and low-bitrate exfiltration solution over an IRU you've purchased, or run your own big cable to the tap location. Much easier to tap at the cable landing site.)

Probably. But what would the cable operator do about it? Even assuming they could locate the section of cable that sent down, sending a ship out to it and either sending divers down or (more likely) hoisting the cable up for inspection would be incredibly expensive.

Edit: And if they did somehow find a tap, its hard to know what they would they do then. Snip it off and trigger an 'incident', or leave it in-place and forget they ever saw it. My guess is that the share holders would rather didn't look in the first place.

Maybe the tap could be done covertly before commissioning.

You just come ten miles behind the cable laying ship and splice it before it's ever terminated. I don't know if cable laying ships keep a connection to land over the cable as it's laid, but even if they do, you just place somebody on the ship to notify you when they're asleep or to tamper with the monitoring system.

It's very sad to see Pacific Fibre shut down, because they had done an incredible amount of work to get the major corporate and political players on board. They were basically putting forward the only credible plan to lay a new cable, and it's now very unlikely that the Southern Cross cable will lose its absolute monopoly (it's essentially the only connection that New Zealand has to the outside world). It's a sad day for all technology-driven businesses that want to start (or remain) in the country.

400MM USD project, of which from the map about 15% of the distance is AU-NZ, 85% is NZ-US. Population of NZ is 4.4MM people, so less than 100 USD per person. Maybe a crowd sourcing effort could get some of the way there in exchange for bandwidth, or wide equity investment in a project company. Possibly some funding from users on the AU / US sides as well.

Also for the security concerns, can you do an external audit of the equipment? How much does it cost for somebody to strip down some chips and do the necessary reverse engineering? You would think this could be costed out as an additional cost due to the trust gap between the countries, then the security issue becomes one which can be resolved but at a cost that is potentially not competitive rather than just a political issue where one side appears not to have interest in free trade.

It's not a case of some chips though. To be sure, you would have to do it to every chip you used - and even then it'd be quite possible you've missed something.

Realistically this is about power rather than espionage. In a similar way to how the booming US displaced Britain of a lot of the major international cables around the turn of the 1900s, so China will want to try it.

Not sure what you mean about displacing Britain, but sounds interesting, can you elaborate?

I would have thought you could structure a deal to maintain power where necessary so that China can't come in and cut off your bandwidth, but maybe not.

Regarding the chips, I wouldn't have thought you need to be 100% sure, 99.9% might be good enough if you can get there by random sampling of significantly less chips than 100%. In any case, that cost analysis is what's required and that's the case e.g. Huawei are making here.

There are reasons to be careful in dealings with the Chinese, but it might be better for both sides if some level of transparency can be maintained.

Wouldn't there be a problem with vendor support? Presumedly you'd have something in the contract where they'd fix things that break when it's their fault. That would include hardware and firmware. For the later, they might just insist that remote access is the only way they can fix it. If you need to upgrade the firmware then you need to do the audit all over again. Maybe an open source firmware would help, but at the end of the day you still need a vendor you can trust.

The US will probably not allow the cable to land on their side if it was made using chinese components, so even if they did manage to crowd source 400MM, it wouldn't work.

Could they land it in Mexico or Canada instead?

If only there was some way to scramble data transmissions so that they would be unreadable to unauthorized adversaries...

I wonder: if accurately reported, does this objection signal that the USA thinks commercially-available encryption isn't sufficient to prevent Chinese spying?

I think it may be more that commercially available encryption is not being used widely enough, or in a strong enough form. You can use 4096 bit RSA keys, but not many people do.

Would it really be feasible to encrypt/decrypt all data going over such a large link? What kind of latency would that add?

Surprisingly low latency, since you can parallelize. It would be expensive, but not THAT expensive. You would also want to pad the traffic to complicate/eliminate traffic analysis, but all of this could be done outside the hardware.

It might cost more than buying US equipment, though. Although you could add it as you turn up waves, so not that bad upfront.

Is it practical to encrypt the entire cable as part of the interface? Or are you referring to each application encrypting itself?

New Zealand is currently undergoing a nationwide rollout of residential fibre and ISPs are proudly promoting upcoming 'ultra-fast broadband' services. The unfortunate reality is however that without investment in more overseas bandwidth, the fibre is going to do little other than allow New Zealanders to watch HD re-runs of Shortland Street.

the fibre is going to do little other than allow New Zealanders to watch HD re-runs of Shortland Street.

On the other hand, it only takes one or two New Zealanders to download content from foreign servers and mirror it, through bit torrent or other means, to everyone else in NZ.

Transfer caps are the norm here - we used to have zero-rated national traffic but that was phased out by all ISPs some time in the early 2000s.

You're absolutely right, if all our piracy at least was kept on-shore via DC++ or similar, it would likely cut demand for international bandwidth in half (the same goes for probably any country). As it stands there are substantial caching servers employed by every ISP for most high-traffic static content (Youtube, Steam, onshore broadcasting...)

And still pay $1 per GB for the privilege.

I don't understand this... Haven't we solved this problem (i.e cryptography?)

Monitoring equipment in the cables don't help you solve math problems any faster?

It's fair enough, really: the US wanted exclusive spying rights.

When will we finally get rid of the monopoly on bandwidth :(

I wish the government would just spend the money investing the difference. We could sell our assets for something useful!

This is pretty sad news.

In the 90's, I heard that ihug internet used to get their bandwidth via a satellite to the USA.

Do options like this still exist? Would they even be feasible for todays bandwidth requirements?

It would be interesting to know what kind of options exist that could provide some much needed competition against the Southern Cross cable

As far as I know, bandwidth isn't the limiting factor in satellite communication, but latency is. The distance to geostationary orbit means that a round trip for a packet would take at least 500ms before factoring in networking delays etc.

Yes those options still exist, no they do not even come close to the bandwith or the pricing available on submarine cable systems.

Pricing on Southern Cross cable dropped massively a few years back when PIPE's PPC-1 went from Sydney to Guam. Ending the cosy duopoly between AJC1 and SSC. It was also one of the first cables out of Australia that wasn't owned partly by an incumbent telco (Telstra, Optus etc).

It seems like a smart idea for another player step in and maybe build another NZ-AUS only cable.

I must admit, the pacific was seemed hugely ambitious and I was wondering if something would come in and derail it. I never thought that espionage reasons would be one.

This is very disappointing.

http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/the-internaut/pacific-f... - has a good summary of coverage on this issue from Radio NZ.

Did they even try to approach Google about this investment? Article mentioned a bunch of telecoms, but not Google, who is getting into fiber infrastructure in a big way and for whom $400m is chump change.

that's right! Leave the spying on Americans for the US Govt..

This sucks. The US tap cables all over the place but heaven forbid a new cable goes down with even a hint of Chinese involvement!

fuckin a!

just makes us (nz+aus) look like a client states. fuck the usa and their corporate self interest... run the cable to mexico.

suspect this has far more to do with economic espionage then reds under the bed.

I'm Australian, and the thing is, for Australia at least, we _are_ a client state. I don't like it, but the facts are clear. Take for instance the leaked US State Department cables revealing Mark Arbib to be a US spy. The repercussions? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Or look at how the vast majority of Australians want Australia to withdraw from Afghanistan. And yet both major parties support continued involvement. There was a Prime Minister who announced that he would withdraw the troops. And within weeks he was knifed in the back by his own party, and a new PM, one totally committed to US interests was installed.

Or the permanent stationing of US troops in Darwin (closer to China). Or now in the last few days the revelation of plans being drawn up in secret to build a US nuclear weapons base in Perth, Western Australia. Or Abbots recent trip to kiss yankee ass. Or Gillard's address to congress earlier in the year.

If you want to understand the real game of Australian politics, then you need to read Mark Latham's "The Latham Diaries". Australian politicians and media hated him for what he revealed in his diaries. He spilt the beans. All of them! Basically, any parliamentary front-bencher that voices opposition to US foreign policy will quickly be removed by their own party.

At the end of the US-Sino currency wars, there will either be trading blocs, or a hot war. And in either case we will not be falling on the China side. The US is stepping up and saying to China 'hands off'. This is not about about espionage. This is about control. And resources. And regional strength. Things are going to get a lot hotter. Start digging that bunker!

"And in either case we will not be falling on the China side."

Why on earth would you want to? You know they're a dictatorship with no respect for human rights?

Economic incentives? China is a major trading partner for NZ at least.

    China overtook the United States at the end of 2008
    to become New Zealand's second largest trading partner,
    with bilateral trade amounting to $9.4 billion in the
    year ended December 2009.

source: http://www.nzdmo.govt.nz/publications/nzefo/2010/17.htm

It's better to use the percentage to put it in perspective.

China makes up 9.1% of New Zealand exports.

But so is the US. More fascist than dictatorship. But certainly no respect for human rights. I mean, have you been asleep the last decade? They're China but with slicker PR.

But even more so because Australia is a two product, two customer economy. One of those customers is China. The other is not the US. I'll let you look it up.

I don't think your comment really bares any relation to reality.

The US isn't perfect, but actually has elections, an independent judiciary, doesn't lock up dissidents, doesn't make women forcibly abort their babies, etc etc.

Ok. You think China is a dictatorship. It is not. The merit of US elections needs to be demonstrated. Not much changed after the last one. Their judiciary is not 'independent'. Judges are not appointed for life so feather their post judicial nest with pro-corporate rulings. It does indeed lock up dissidents. It has the highest incarceration rate per capita of any nation.

I'll give you the infanticide point.

I mean does it really come down to which country is less rotten? We can be friends with both. I just don't think we'll be given the chance to.

What you are talking about is complete nonsense.

http://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/trade/trade-at-a-glance-...

China makes up only 22.6% of our trade exports. And at the end of the day the US is still a stable democracy with a free press, free speech and core values very closely aligned to Australia.

DFAT numbers contradict other ABS data.

I cite the following "complete nonsense":

http://www.lighthouseinvestmentmanagement.com/2012/01/05/the...

You might also find this eight part series "complete nonsense":

http://theconversation.edu.au/why-australias-trade-relations...

But surely there is a disctinction to be made between a liberal western democracy, and an oppressive one that doesn't respect human rights?

Yes, but sometimes the actions of the liberal western democracies aren't always so worthy.

Yes, they're not perfect by any means, but they are an order of magnitude better.

I disagree. China employs cheque book diplomacy. The US employs military force diplomacy.

I don't know which country you come from, but I know that down here in Australia, we are geographically connected to Asia. A very large proportion of our population is of Asian heritage. Chinese is now the second most spoken language in Australia (but still a minor percentage). Our last Prime Minister spoke it fluently. And the sentiment of the average Australian is quite different to your perspective.

We haven't been fed endless reams of US propaganda but we've seen clearly what is happening in the US. The crackdown of occupy movements. The NDAA. HR 347. Obama's kill list. Al Alwaki. His 16 year old son. The comments about Julian Assange. The treatment of Bradley Manning. I can go on and on and on. But its off topic.

OK. So China is a big, bad, mean, corrupt, communist regime. But they are actually paying our bills. They are putting up real money and providing real investment. We didn't sail through the GFC v1 in 2008 because the US graciously helped us. It was China.

It doesn't really matter if I'm wrong or right. I'm just pointing out that the perspective from here is very different to the perspective you may have.

For the record, I'm English.

I don't think you can compare the crackdown on the Occupy movements to what happens to people like Ai Weiwei. We had our own Occupy movement which was moved on, but that had as much to do with drunkeness, drug taking and defecating in St Pauls Cathedral as it did with political oppression.

I agree China is a major financial power now, but just because they have money it doesn't stop them being just as unethical and repressive as before.

Also as an Australian.

Yes we are geographically connected to Asia but we are not Asian and despite how many immigrants we take on we will always be a Western country aligned to UK first and US second. That isn't going to change.

And nobody in Australia really cares about these fringe issues. In Melbourne our most liberal city we've had protests about Assange, Manning as well as some related to Occupy Movement. Guess what. Nobody turned up.

Because at the end of the day Australia is a pragmatic country and realise that China very much sees us as a useful resource partner whilst the US sees us as a useful ally.

> a Western country aligned to UK first and US second

I'm glad we agree. That was my point when I earlier wrote: "And in either case we will not be falling on the China side." My subtler point is although this will happen, it will not be in our greater interest. As evidenced by this pacific cable project cancellation.

> And nobody in Australia really cares about these fringe issues. In Melbourne our most liberal city we've had protests about Assange, Manning as well as some related to Occupy Movement. Guess what. Nobody turned up.

That's not a good thing. Nor does it have anything to do with economic partnerships or infrastructure investments. I did say it was off topic.

'liberal western democracy'. That's actually quite funny.

Yeah, remember that thing with college students and tanks in Times Square?

Oh wait...

> an oppressive one that doesn't respect human rights

Wait which country is that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com