Mystery Cable Activated in Cuba
renesys.com
renesys.com
If you're an island nation with one cable for all your traffic you are very susceptible to a variety of state actor attacks: traffic analysis, mitm, protocol downgrades etc.
If your traffic goes out one way and back in via a totally divergent link these kinds of techniques become significantly harder to pull off and much easier to detect their use.
Passive undersea fiber monitoring is well within the means of more than a few intelligence operations and quite popular. They're in international water, unguarded, unrealistic to regularly inspect and they can be modified to leak just enough light to see every bit while being pretty difficult to detect.
A cable strung between Venezuela and Cuba would be impossible to resist for anyone in the region with a highly advanced signals intelligence program and spent 40+ years defined by communism/socialism as public enemy number one.
A year delay in lighting at all suggests to me very strongly that they had direct evidence or strong indicators that their cable had been split/bent or their DWDM repeaters / inline terminals or other equipment came into question - most of it is made by companies pretty cozy with large state actors.
After traffic snooping your second big intelligence concern these days is data exfiltration. The classic radio bug is way more trouble and effort than malware mics & cams, keyloggers and mobile phones. Even more popular is just files - grab it all and see whats good. Mostly that's very hard to catch leaving the country because there are so many paths and the data volume is so large.
But if you've previously built a monitoring system for your only route out, and it's slow enough you can do a credible job of traffic analysis then you're probably loathe to give up on it. In comparison, the kind of gear needed to do DPI, anomaly detection, key weakening etc. at a 100G+ is very pricey and probably covered by export bans anyway.
Asymmetric internet works pretty well anyway. Most commercial service is tuned that way because thats what the use looks like, way more in than out. Sat latency ain't a ball of joy but for bulk data and web pages it's probably pretty decent service especially when compared to what it's replacing.
I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often, actually.
What kind of equipment/engineering would be required for that?
Has there been any documented cases of a government doing that in the past?
Regarding Fibre I am not sure of documented cases but: http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cabl...
Here is a page with some pictures of something along those lines:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/protect-your-netwo...
Here is an article about a US sub equipped for this kind of job:
Top tier crypto gear including anything suitable for trunk class traffic is one of the most controlled export goods - canada is literally the only country on earth that doesn't require an export license.
Realistically it's mostly a formality if the destination is on the list of favored nations, mostly western democracies. There are 3 more tiers: mostly ambivalent, our shit list and lastly those we label rogue/terrorist.
Mass communications gear and business grade crypto get a lot of scrutiny, really only topped by spaceflight and the tools of war.
Theoretically you'd probably be able to get export licenses for high speed aes to send to Venezuela, but practically it would be subject to a ton of discretionary terms that would make it a non-starter. A smattering of possible terms the US would impose: all source code including 100% of the ASIC designs, use of a US ASIC fab with production under the supervision of the government, require lawful intercept functions to be enabled, key escrow storage in us territory only, no customer access to source code, software upgrades performed only by us personel on site, mandatory random on site checks by us government officials to ensure it hasn't been transferred, is used in a licensed manner, hasn't been tampered with, software is approved version, etc.
It's not like they'd demand a huge obvious list like that, but pretty much any one of those restrictions means the customer is pretty much at the mercy of the US government. Most of those practices are designed to find or insert flaws that enable total plaintext recovery.
Understandably most states that are subject to intense US intelligence activity generally don't even consider it. There is plenty of diversion that goes on through cutouts, but there are plenty of published stories where US intelligence knew all about it and owned the gear before it shipped.
Practically your other choice is chinese gear, which is what most of that class of country buys. But the chinese gear is almost certainly subject to similar intentional weaknesses in addition to stuff placed by multiple competing domestic security services so they can spy on each other. It's a pretty safe bet that a number of western intelligence agencies can exploit these as well - so you're back to square one again.
General purpose software is an option of course, but i think itd take a lot of kludges to handle such a fat pipe with consumer cpus/gpus. And then of course they are a bunch of computers on a network with static encryption keys sitting in memory run by poorly paid government workers, probably not something that would resist a motivated attacker.
This cable was laid between Venezuela and Cuba in 2007. There was an attempt about a couple of years ago to block certain websites here in Venezuela that were deemed dangerous by the government. The reaction from the people over twitter and FB prevented it. I've always been worried that the venezuelan govt will follow the lessons from their cuban and chinese mentors.
The last family i lived for a week got internet access from a friend who got those coupons. So, from what i was told, basically people that need to have access to the internet at work get a sort of coupons for some hours of internet usage and there of course there's something like a black market for it. Anyway, i don't think peoplein Cuba miss Facebook. They'd probably be more then happy to have mobile phones in general and a good mobile/GPRS coverage for now. In general, internet is so extremely slow over there that it feels like the whole country is on an analog line from Fidels office.
All residential Internet access in Cuba is illegal (as in is not legally sanctioned by the government) using good old modems, and only a handful of people in very high government positions can have an officially sanctioned house connection. Everyone else is buying it off the black market.
Cellphone coverage is only basic voice and texting without Internet access, and at horribly expensive rates.
The article implies that the cubans are, for some reason, receiving packets over fiber, but sending over satellite, which, for all intents and purposes, is insane. It is a real mystery as to why anyone would configure a network to operate in this manner.
It is akin to having a 10gigabit fiber line in your office and choosing to have all outbound traffic routed over a 1.5megabit DSL line instead. Madness!
The Internet in Cuba is characterized by a low number of
connections, limited bandwidth, censorship, and high cost.
Madness is exactly the word the Castros were aiming for.
And that really isn't about the cable either.
Maybe all their filtering toys currently only work with the sat uplinks. Who knows. Non-free countries have crazy networking to remain non-free.
wikipedia: Cuba has an Internet penetration of 1 to 3 percent; making it the lowest rate in Latin America and one of the lowest in the world
/this is a feature not a bug.
Damn - just out of the reach of my intution.