It's true you shouldn't tinker with many types of hardware without extensive knowledge and experience. You're going to want to staff your off-world outpost with

It's true you shouldn't tinker with many types of hardware without extensive knowledge and experience. You're going to want to staff your off-world outpost with competent engineers and scientists that can develop and test new task-specific software or patch existing software, not some random entry-level programmer or tinkerer. IMO it would be extremely arrogant for a manufacturer to claim their remote updates "must" be tested adequately in every conceivable environment, up to and past the operating requirement extremes because some imaginary regulation dictates it. From {m,b,tr}illions of miles away because AFAIK the best they can do is simulate what might happen, not actually test operation in a real environment as their life actually depends on it. If I cannot audit the encrypted bytestream it sure as hell is not going to be piped into any of my spacecraft, life support, communication systems, or anything TBH. With me, trust starts with being able to read the source code, and modify it when it needs to be fixed. Giving a specific crypto function too much trust could leave you vulnerable or even lock you out of fixing critical flaws that "the manufacturer" sees as perfectly fine and within spec. Maybe I've just had too many horrific experiences with software updates and that is causing some bias. Or seen too many science fiction films.