8 ms·
I don’t think they jammed it, considering how high it was. Intercepted .. I mean, China can use strong encryption too.
by 404mm 4y ago
I don’t think they jammed it, considering how high it was. Intercepted .. I mean, China can use strong encryption too.
- ttul 4y agoUS military aircraft can remotely destroy electronics aboard other aircraft by aiming a highly focused beam precisely onto it, thus disabling it. They do t have to decrypt anything. They just have to fry it.
- cma 4y agoA great way to study those capabilities then would be to send a trial balloon... We aren't goijg ti necessarily reveal intricate details of our capabilities like that.
- alanh 4y agomaybe but... it seems clear enough they did not do this given that it seems to have been piloted through a very nice high-value course across the US
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoWeather balloons aren’t piloted. I don’t think it had any control planes at all, beyond just floating along atmospheric currents. At best they can control elevation? Ok, googling a bit: > Is it possible to steer or otherwise control a typical high-altitude balloon? It can be controlled, but let me be careful about what I mean by that. Balloons go with the wind. And so the only control that a balloon has is: in some balloons, you can control the altitude—you can make it go higher or lower. To the extent that the wind speed and direction varies with altitude, you can change the altitude, within some limits. And that can give you some measure of control—but not anywhere near the level of control that you have [with an airplane]. You can’t turn around and go the other direction; you can never go upwind in the balloon. You’re always going to be moving with the atmosphere that surrounds it. From https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinese-spy-balloon-has-unexpected-maneuverability/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinese-spy-ballo... So does that really count as piloting?
- lokar 4y agoWind directions vary by altitude. This was the whole premise of Loon (google), and aiui that part worked well.
- T-A 4y agohttps://aerostar.com/products/balloons-airships/thunderhead-balloons https://aerostar.com/products/balloons-airships/thunderhead-...
- mattlondon 4y agoIIRC google loon did exactly this and was able to basically go wherever they wanted.
- ncr100 4y agoJamming vs encryption... They are unrelated.
- geomark 4y agoTangentially related. Spread spectrum signals are jamming resistant, have lower probability of intercept and can be effectively cryptographically secure.
- enkid 4y agoSpread spectrum has little to do with whether or not the signal is truly encrypted.
- geomark 4y agoA cryptographically secure sequence is used to spread the signal or do frequency hopping. The baseband may not even be encrypted but the signal definitely is.
- ncr100 4y agoCool! Thank you @geomark for the enlightening point.
- danenania 4y agoThey can use strong encryption, but can they protect their private keys?
- nnx 4y agoAsymmetric encryption. The private key does not have to be stored in the balloon at all (only the public key that can encrypt but NOT decrypt), it can stay safely in a PLA datacenter in China.
- tomp 4y agoDoes anyone actually use asymmetric encryption to encrypt data? I thought asymmetric encryption was just used to encrypt the symmetric key used to encrypt the data…
- tsimionescu 4y agoIt's typically too slow for significant amounts of data, but there's of course a trade-off to be made.
- jhugo 4y agoThis is basically an optimisation — asymmetric encryption is more resource-intensive. But for relatively short, fire-and-forget type messages (e.g. GPG-encrypted email), encrypting directly with the public key is fairly common.
- funnymony 4y agoRsa encrypted content size limit depends on the key size, which does not scale well. Is GPG not a subject to this limitation?
- jhugo 4y agoI was wrong regarding GPG — see my sibling comment to yours! Direct use of asymmetric encryption is still feasible for short messages where performance is not as much of a concern, though.