Is there any security in the communication with Voyager I?

Submitted ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨VegOwOtenks@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

I mean the Voyager 1 probe which is currently the manmade object the farthest away from earth. The space program people operating the mission seem to have great control options, they even “moved software from one chip to another” (link) Apart from the probably gigantic and expensive installation needed to receive and/or send messages from/to that far away from home (23 hours of delay?), are there any safety measures to prevent a potentially malicous actor from sending commands to the probe?

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expatriado@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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

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EleventhHour@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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 most people would be familiar with. Whatever data got intercepted would likely come out as gibberish.

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- sanguinepar@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  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…
  
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- foggy@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  China:
  
  Haha! We’re gonna publish this miniscule finding first! Suckers!
  
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Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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- batmaniam@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
You might enjoy this read: destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/

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TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Naw, go for it

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spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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Deestan@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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. :)

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- yoevli@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Deestan@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Correct. But also xkcd.com/538/ . Hence why I said “or bribes and kidnappings”.
    
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  - shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- VegOwOtenks@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Deestan@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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.
    
    Buy 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. :)
    
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