[ih] NATO Plans an Orbital Backup Internet Using Satellite Broadband (IEEE Spectrum)

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

*An undersea cable breach would reroute to satellites*
EXCERPT:

ON 18 FEBRUARY 2024, a missile attack from the Houthi militants in Yemen
hit the cargo ship Rubymar in the Red Sea. With the crew evacuated, the
disabled ship would take weeks to finally sink, becoming an symbol for the
security of the global Internet in the process. Before it went down, the
ship dragged its anchor behind it over an estimated 70 kilometers. The
meandering anchor wound up severing three fiber-optic cables across the Red
Sea floor, which carried about a quarter of all the Internet traffic
between Europe and Asia. Data transmissions had to be rerouted as system
engineers realized the cables had been damaged. So this year, NATO, the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, will begin testing a plan to fix the
vulnerability that the Rubymar’s sinking so vividly illustrated.

The world’s submarine fiber-optic lines carry more than 95 percent of
intercontinental Internet communications. These tiny, drawn-out strands of
glass fiber stretch some 1.2 million km around the planet, each line with
the potential to become its own delicate choke point. Between 500 and 600
cables crisscross ocean floors worldwide.

“They’re not buried when they cross an ocean,” says Tim Stronge, vice
president of research at the telecommunications consulting firm
TeleGeography. “They’re sitting right on the seafloor, and at oceanic
depths, at deep-sea depths, they’re about this thick”—he makes a circle
with his fingers—“less than a garden hose. They’re fragile.”

Undersea fiber-optic cables, by some estimates, are used for more than US
$10 trillion in financial transactions every day, as well as encrypted
defense communications and other digital communications. If one sinking
ship could accidentally take out a portion of global data transmission,
what could happen in an organized attack by a determined government?

Enter NATO, which has now launched a pilot project to figure out how best
to protect global Internet traffic and redirect it when there’s trouble.
The project is called HEIST, short for hybrid space-submarine architecture
ensuring infosec of telecommunications. (“Infosec” is short for
“information security.”)

[...]
https://spectrum.ieee.org/undersea-internet-cables-nato

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True