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How worried are we really about surveillance on undersea cables, by China or otherwise? Almost everything over those fibers is already encrypted. Are we worried
by andrewflnr 4y ago
How worried are we really about surveillance on undersea cables, by China or otherwise? Almost everything over those fibers is already encrypted. Are we worried about metadata? Assuming the hostile power in question already has a bunch of TLS private keys to work with?
- itake 4y agoIf there is a war, whoever owns the cables could control what traffic flows through them. DNS queries are plain text.
- fishsticks89 4y agoAn idea is that nations are storing the encrypted packets now to decrypt them once they have access to a number of sufficiently fast quantum computers (store/harvest now decrypt later). This assumes the data will still be useful in the future.
- aunty_helen 4y agoPreposterous. You would need massive data centers to do that… https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/131661727/government-has-been-secretly-building-a-300m-data-centre-at-an-auckland-air-force-base https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/131661727/government-has-been...
- golem14 4y agoNot just the surveillance. The other fear is that an adversary can just shut out countries at a whim. Of course, it's easier to just change a policy at an endpoint you control, rather than cutting up undersea cables and shooting down satellites. "Oh, a fishing trawler has cut your country's internet access ? Tzz, tzz, tzz, those sub-par american cables ... No worry, you can buy ours that happens to be much sturdier and at the low, low price of whatever you paid before the cable was cut".