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how do you create encrypted communication that isn't easily triangulated? some youtubers are pushing LoRa but its hardly secure or encrypted creating your own

how do you create encrypted communication that isn't easily triangulated? some youtubers are pushing LoRa but its hardly secure or encrypted creating your own number station requires shortwave broadcast which takes up a ton of power and your station is known the only way to break 5E is good old paper with one time pad encryption with dead drops but its hardly efficient

oceanplexian 2y ago
This is exactly what Meshtastic is designed to do. Messages are encrypted with AES256, its extremely low power (And thus hard to triangulate), and can use a low powered repeater, hiding the location of a sender using a directional antenna. Nothing is impossible in terms of tracing or finding vulnerabilities but Meshtastic makes it a pain for an adversary.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  meshtastic is terrible for avoiding triangulation. you operate in receiver mode and you have a unique ID. so you can send nonsense packets to that ID repeatedly and it'll send them right out again. Any kind of forwarding system with static IDs is very much not triangulation resistant.
user32489318 2y ago
Instinct tells me that you can have one of three, non triangulatable, secure/encrypted or high bandwidth
- localfirst 2y ago
  lot of us would take first two over high bandwidth so far im seeing starlink + modded smartphone "s4tll1te p1r4cy" that ppl outside N America ignore but supposedly risky for everyone else variations on LoRa (still not convinced it can evade tri)
jrexilius 2y ago
LoRa is just a transport layer. You can do whatever encryption you want and LoRaWAN has some basic encryption built in. It's hard(er) to triangulate if you don't have constant traffic (like route updates in mesh, or heavy concentrated users like at a concert or protest), but be aware that AWS sidewalk (and all the alexa devices fielded in peoples homes, etc.) run LoRa antennas and traffic. So in the US, Amazon could do a reasonable job at triangulation of frequent emitters. In China and EU there is infrastructure in place (5G/SDR stuff overtly) that can do a pretty good job at triangulating a wide band of RF emitters. Meshtastic is not really designed to avoid that, but more for resiliency and off-grid type scenarios. Your best bet of really avoiding triangulation by state or telco level infratructure is to get creative with frequency and even transport layer hopping. None of which is really consumer friendly. [edit-to-add] another tactic to for low probability detection is to hide in noise on high traffic channels. basically figure out what their filter sensitivty is and see if you can go below that threshold and still maintain coherent channel, etc.
- immibis 2y ago
  On the subject of hiding in high traffic channels, I wonder if I can even mention satellite piracy without getting on more watchlists. It's a thing that exists. Many satellites are relatively unsophisticated signal repeaters, and the antenna that receives their uplink signal isn't very directional, either. Or so I heard. Some companies have been known to go crazy trying to find out who's transmitting to their satellite that shouldn't, because they could be almost anywhere. Of course, if caught, they go to prison for a long time.
  - jrexilius 2y ago
    Yeah, it's also worth noting that Starlink and a few other commercial companies are offering text-based services to _unmodified_ cell phones (no special sat hardware), which means they can get signal, IMEI, etc. LoRa is also used as transport layer for some cube sats and edu type sats. A new company just tested Bluetooth-to-sat. So even on the commercial side there are overhead sensors that you may need to be concerned about on the triangulation front. It's a hard problem to crack...
immibis 2y ago
If you're an average Hacker News user, you use Tor over the Internet. If you're a more paranoid one, you use Tor to access your Protonmail account that you use with Mixmaster.
- localfirst 2y ago
  Tor is neither anonymous or safe, there has been variety of vulnerabilities, zero days. The other options involving radios, satellites is far more sexy
KaiserPro 2y ago
> isn't easily triangulated? Depends. Anything with high enough power is triangulateable, if you have either enough time, or enough listening equipment. also what precision are we talking about? on longwave you can bounce radio signals about quite a lot, but you lack bandwith, and the antenna are huge. If you have a high band width transmitter, and you are doing async transmission, ie send a message when you are far away, then its not as critical.
superkuh 2y ago
Near verticial incidence skywave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_vertical_incidence_skywave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_vertical_incidence_skywav... using the HF bands and HF antenna very close to the ground. This will cause your signal to basically only go up and then bounce off the ionosphere. This causes you signal to skip a ring of a ~100 miles around you forming a donut of gound locations that can receive it from the ionosphere bounce. The triangulation will not be to your location to to the ionospheric bounce. Locally it'll propagate via groundwave but that will quickly die out with the first hills and valleys. A network of ~300 mi seperated stations doing NVIS could be fairly hard to locate. To make it slightly harder you could try using ultrawide bandwidth modulations (UWB) at HF freqs but propagations differences between the freqs will make it hard. I say all of this but it depends on your threat model. Nowadays major nations have electromagnetic signals intelligence satellites even for HF up in orbit and have a line of sight to everything.

oceanplexian 2y ago

This is exactly what Meshtastic is designed to do. Messages are encrypted with AES256, its extremely low power (And thus hard to triangulate), and can use a low powered repeater, hiding the location of a sender using a directional antenna. Nothing is impossible in terms of tracing or finding vulnerabilities but Meshtastic makes it a pain for an adversary.

KaiserPro 2y ago
meshtastic is terrible for avoiding triangulation. you operate in receiver mode and you have a unique ID. so you can send nonsense packets to that ID repeatedly and it'll send them right out again. Any kind of forwarding system with static IDs is very much not triangulation resistant.

user32489318 2y ago

Instinct tells me that you can have one of three, non triangulatable, secure/encrypted or high bandwidth

localfirst 2y ago
lot of us would take first two over high bandwidth so far im seeing starlink + modded smartphone "s4tll1te p1r4cy" that ppl outside N America ignore but supposedly risky for everyone else variations on LoRa (still not convinced it can evade tri)

jrexilius 2y ago

LoRa is just a transport layer. You can do whatever encryption you want and LoRaWAN has some basic encryption built in. It's hard(er) to triangulate if you don't have constant traffic (like route updates in mesh, or heavy concentrated users like at a concert or protest), but be aware that AWS sidewalk (and all the alexa devices fielded in peoples homes, etc.) run LoRa antennas and traffic. So in the US, Amazon could do a reasonable job at triangulation of frequent emitters. In China and EU there is infrastructure in place (5G/SDR stuff overtly) that can do a pretty good job at triangulating a wide band of RF emitters. Meshtastic is not really designed to avoid that, but more for resiliency and off-grid type scenarios. Your best bet of really avoiding triangulation by state or telco level infratructure is to get creative with frequency and even transport layer hopping. None of which is really consumer friendly. [edit-to-add] another tactic to for low probability detection is to hide in noise on high traffic channels. basically figure out what their filter sensitivty is and see if you can go below that threshold and still maintain coherent channel, etc.

immibis 2y ago
On the subject of hiding in high traffic channels, I wonder if I can even mention satellite piracy without getting on more watchlists. It's a thing that exists. Many satellites are relatively unsophisticated signal repeaters, and the antenna that receives their uplink signal isn't very directional, either. Or so I heard. Some companies have been known to go crazy trying to find out who's transmitting to their satellite that shouldn't, because they could be almost anywhere. Of course, if caught, they go to prison for a long time.
- jrexilius 2y ago
  Yeah, it's also worth noting that Starlink and a few other commercial companies are offering text-based services to _unmodified_ cell phones (no special sat hardware), which means they can get signal, IMEI, etc. LoRa is also used as transport layer for some cube sats and edu type sats. A new company just tested Bluetooth-to-sat. So even on the commercial side there are overhead sensors that you may need to be concerned about on the triangulation front. It's a hard problem to crack...

immibis 2y ago

If you're an average Hacker News user, you use Tor over the Internet. If you're a more paranoid one, you use Tor to access your Protonmail account that you use with Mixmaster.

localfirst 2y ago
Tor is neither anonymous or safe, there has been variety of vulnerabilities, zero days. The other options involving radios, satellites is far more sexy

KaiserPro 2y ago

> isn't easily triangulated? Depends. Anything with high enough power is triangulateable, if you have either enough time, or enough listening equipment. also what precision are we talking about? on longwave you can bounce radio signals about quite a lot, but you lack bandwith, and the antenna are huge. If you have a high band width transmitter, and you are doing async transmission, ie send a message when you are far away, then its not as critical.

superkuh 2y ago

Near verticial incidence skywave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_vertical_incidence_skywave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_vertical_incidence_skywav... using the HF bands and HF antenna very close to the ground. This will cause your signal to basically only go up and then bounce off the ionosphere. This causes you signal to skip a ring of a ~100 miles around you forming a donut of gound locations that can receive it from the ionosphere bounce. The triangulation will not be to your location to to the ionospheric bounce. Locally it'll propagate via groundwave but that will quickly die out with the first hills and valleys. A network of ~300 mi seperated stations doing NVIS could be fairly hard to locate. To make it slightly harder you could try using ultrawide bandwidth modulations (UWB) at HF freqs but propagations differences between the freqs will make it hard. I say all of this but it depends on your threat model. Nowadays major nations have electromagnetic signals intelligence satellites even for HF up in orbit and have a line of sight to everything.