NASA use parabolic antennas that are 35+ meters in diameter and consume 20KW to generate the 0.01 degree beamwidth signal, that alone will demotivate hackers
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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My brain makes some dumb connections. This is basically Dom Joly with his enormous mobile phone, shouting INCREDIBLY LOUDLY into it.
Do not trust this man
Yeah, obscurity. The code sent back-and-forth is proprietary to NASA in the 70s. I’d be shocked if anyone else has any idea how it interpret it other than NASA themselves. it’s not impossible, of course, but it doesn’t use any common protocols or software that anyone outside of NASA would be familiar with. Whatever data got intercepted would likely come out as gibberish.
To get anything useful out of the data, they would have to have a replica of NASA’s Voyager ground computer. And its software package. The plans for those are not exactly on the Internet.
it doesn’t use any common protocols or software that anyone outside of NASA would be familiar with.
Suddenly Lemmy hates Voyager because it's not FOSS...
China:
Haha! We're gonna publish this miniscule finding first! Suckers!
There are several problems if you want to interfere that communication.
First, you need to reverse engineer the protocol. For that you need to be able to log what nasa is sending and what they are receiving. Both has quite some problems, as the sending signal is tightly focused towards the spacecraft, so you probably have to find the actual dish and install a bug to read what they are sending. The NASA might object to that.
Second, you would need the hardware. Which is beyond the normal hobbyists budget.
And finally, you would have to be 100% spot on in your reverse engineering of the protocol or you'll probably just brick that thing.
I imagine it's classified, but NASA being NASA, you know a full risk assessment along these lines exists, probably with dutiful updates as it's still an active program. It would be fascinating read especially with the updates, with how much the world has changed while the probe remained the same.
A state actor could definitely do those things. The question is why though. There's not really anything to gain from that, they'd just lose money on it.
This is probably the biggest problem with that idea. If you hack an ancient space probe, you’ll definitely get the appropriate bragging rights, but that’s about it.
Lots of hobby hackers would love to do it, but they don’t have the hardware for it. Some governments might have the hardware, but they just don’t care about bragging that much.
Some people just like to watch the world burn
The physical security is plenty at this point in time. Only another state actor could possibly have the resources to even handle the communication process in the first place, and it would be expensive with zero incentive to act.
Past that, the custom software would have to be both obtained from NASA via espionage and reverse engineered.
If those to impossible hurdles were somehow overcome, the international blowback would be enormous.
You might enjoy this read: https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/
It talks about decoding the signals sent back by Voyager 1
Thanks a lot for the recommendation, I did enjoy the read!
Naw, go for it
Consider why a very strong passkey is protective: It is expensive to crack it. Either you spend a ton of expensive computing power to crack it, or you arrange bribes or kidnapping. At some point, the cost is beyond "lol" budget and needs to be worth it for a lot of powerful people.
So basically it's protected by an extremely strong password. :)
I was wondering about encryption (is this what you're talking about?) because these algorithms change so frequently I'd be surprised if they had anything back then considered 'secure' by now.
Well, sorta. I ruled it out because hardware of that era, limited by Voyager's power supply, could not do encrypted communication beyond wet paper bag levels. And like you said, anything more than 20 years old is not in use anymore because people have poked holes in it.
But encrypted communication is all based on same as a passkey in the end (a sequence of secret bytes), whether we are talking encryption based off public/private keys, symmetric keys, elliptic curve, passphrases etc, so it's comparable enough for the point I was aiming for. :)
I don't see why they would encrypt it at all. I assume everything is setup to keep power usage to a minimum. I would assume some sort of compacting might be done. Its that type of thing which I would assume would kinda secure it. They don't use bog standard stuff and if they can use some unique protocol that saves just a bit of energy they are likely to do it. Keep in mind that since like the 90's a lot of tech stuff has been muscled through rather than maximizing its efficiency. We tend to do efficiency has afterthoughts that effect large swatches like with using video hardware and such.
I mean, you can't exactly just throw computing power at modern cryptography and expect to get results. I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I believe all the computing power on Earth right now would take on the order of at least thousands of years to brute force a good password hash (assuming a strong password), and that's assuming the attacker already has the salt. This makes it less of a budgetary constraint and much more of a practical one.
Quantum computers could feasibly do it. However, even Google's project willow at 105 qubits is not enough. Because if it were, we would have much bigger problems like, oh, I don't know, the encryption that protects your bank account and HTTPS connections.
Post-quantum encryption is a thing.
That's true. I just don't know of a lot of mainstream things that have deployed it quite yet. Like I do not think HTTPS is post quantum secure, or at least not that I'm aware of.