7 ms·

Pacific Fibre cable project sunk by US fears about Chinese espionage

57 points by steve19 14y ago

kiwidrew 14y ago
It's very sad to see Pacific Fibre shut down, because they had done an incredible amount of work to get the major corporate and political players on board. They were basically putting forward the only credible plan to lay a new cable, and it's now very unlikely that the Southern Cross cable will lose its absolute monopoly (it's essentially the only connection that New Zealand has to the outside world). It's a sad day for all technology-driven businesses that want to start (or remain) in the country.
rdl 14y ago
They have some right to block this if they feel there will be espionage, but should have to pay all cost differentials required to not use Chinese equipment and investment. (NSA is welcome to invest, since they'll be wiretapping it anyway, and if European intelligence wants to subsidize ALU to provide equipment, they can have their own monitoring.) Realistically, any major fiber system is going to be monitored by virtually all intelligence agencies of major powers -- at minimum the US plus the endpoint nations, but I wouldn't be surprised if China, Russia, and maybe eventually other countries established submarine tap technology, either in the middle or at underwater branch/repeater units. Angry and sad if this kills the project entirely -- I was really looking forward to Pacific Fibre :(
- malandrew 14y ago
  Can you tap fiber? I thought it was only possible to tap underwater cables that emit electromagnetic waves?
  - vineel 14y ago
    You may be able to tap the repeater units.
  - andyjohnson0 14y ago
    If you can get access to the cable then it is possible to splice into it using fairly standard techniques. Here [1] is an article from 10 years ago that looks at what was going on back then. There is speculation [2] that the US Navy has submarines equipped with 'splicing chambers' and cable laying equipment for this purpose. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cable/115877 http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cabl... [2] http://defensetech.org/2005/02/21/jimmy-carter-super-spy/ http://defensetech.org/2005/02/21/jimmy-carter-super-spy/
    - nopassrecover 14y ago
      Wouldn't someone notice if the cable went out of commission for 10 minutes while they spliced?
      - omh 14y ago
        If your underwater fibre goes down for 10 minutes would international espionage really be the first thing that comes to mind?
        aw3c2 14y ago
        If it comes back, then yes. I don't think fiber can have a "loose connection". It either works or it does not.
        jrockway 14y ago
        That may be true of the fiber, but it's not true of the network equipment driving the fiber. Like all computers, these occasionally need hardware or software upgrades too.
        rdl 14y ago
        You could also arrange for your subsea tapping to be at the same time as an attack (IP or electrical) on the shore station, if you really want it to be difficult to detect. Or do a real cut in one place (with a trawler), while tapping at another place. And possibly cut 5 cables at the same time... Anyone with real security requirements assumes long-haul cables and the general Internet are monitored. Point to point crypto on links is one of the easier problems to solve. (the harder problem is doing something once you've tapped -- you either need to build a multi-wave analysis box and low-bitrate exfiltration solution over an IRU you've purchased, or run your own big cable to the tap location. Much easier to tap at the cable landing site.)
mparlane 14y ago
When will we finally get rid of the monopoly on bandwidth :( I wish the government would just spend the money investing the difference. We could sell our assets for something useful!
ximeng 14y ago
400MM USD project, of which from the map about 15% of the distance is AU-NZ, 85% is NZ-US. Population of NZ is 4.4MM people, so less than 100 USD per person. Maybe a crowd sourcing effort could get some of the way there in exchange for bandwidth, or wide equity investment in a project company. Possibly some funding from users on the AU / US sides as well. Also for the security concerns, can you do an external audit of the equipment? How much does it cost for somebody to strip down some chips and do the necessary reverse engineering? You would think this could be costed out as an additional cost due to the trust gap between the countries, then the security issue becomes one which can be resolved but at a cost that is potentially not competitive rather than just a political issue where one side appears not to have interest in free trade.
- 46Bit 14y ago
  It's not a case of some chips though. To be sure, you would have to do it to every chip you used - and even then it'd be quite possible you've missed something. Realistically this is about power rather than espionage. In a similar way to how the booming US displaced Britain of a lot of the major international cables around the turn of the 1900s, so China will want to try it.
  - ximeng 14y ago
    Not sure what you mean about displacing Britain, but sounds interesting, can you elaborate? I would have thought you could structure a deal to maintain power where necessary so that China can't come in and cut off your bandwidth, but maybe not. Regarding the chips, I wouldn't have thought you need to be 100% sure, 99.9% might be good enough if you can get there by random sampling of significantly less chips than 100%. In any case, that cost analysis is what's required and that's the case e.g. Huawei are making here. There are reasons to be careful in dealings with the Chinese, but it might be better for both sides if some level of transparency can be maintained.
- jeza 14y ago
  Wouldn't there be a problem with vendor support? Presumedly you'd have something in the contract where they'd fix things that break when it's their fault. That would include hardware and firmware. For the later, they might just insist that remote access is the only way they can fix it. If you need to upgrade the firmware then you need to do the audit all over again. Maybe an open source firmware would help, but at the end of the day you still need a vendor you can trust.
lwat 14y ago
This sucks. The US tap cables all over the place but heaven forbid a new cable goes down with even a hint of Chinese involvement!
- fungi 14y ago
  fuckin a! just makes us (nz+aus) look like a client states. fuck the usa and their corporate self interest... run the cable to mexico. suspect this has far more to do with economic espionage then reds under the bed.
  - retrogradeorbit 14y ago
    I'm Australian, and the thing is, for Australia at least, we _are_ a client state. I don't like it, but the facts are clear. Take for instance the leaked US State Department cables revealing Mark Arbib to be a US spy. The repercussions? Nothing. Nothing at all. Or look at how the vast majority of Australians want Australia to withdraw from Afghanistan. And yet both major parties support continued involvement. There was a Prime Minister who announced that he would withdraw the troops. And within weeks he was knifed in the back by his own party, and a new PM, one totally committed to US interests was installed. Or the permanent stationing of US troops in Darwin (closer to China). Or now in the last few days the revelation of plans being drawn up in secret to build a US nuclear weapons base in Perth, Western Australia. Or Abbots recent trip to kiss yankee ass. Or Gillard's address to congress earlier in the year. If you want to understand the real game of Australian politics, then you need to read Mark Latham's "The Latham Diaries". Australian politicians and media hated him for what he revealed in his diaries. He spilt the beans. All of them! Basically, any parliamentary front-bencher that voices opposition to US foreign policy will quickly be removed by their own party. At the end of the US-Sino currency wars, there will either be trading blocs, or a hot war. And in either case we will not be falling on the China side. The US is stepping up and saying to China 'hands off'. This is not about about espionage. This is about control. And resources. And regional strength. Things are going to get a lot hotter. Start digging that bunker!
    - gadders 14y ago
squidsoup 14y ago
New Zealand is currently undergoing a nationwide rollout of residential fibre and ISPs are proudly promoting upcoming 'ultra-fast broadband' services. The unfortunate reality is however that without investment in more overseas bandwidth, the fibre is going to do little other than allow New Zealanders to watch HD re-runs of Shortland Street.
- jseliger 14y ago
  the fibre is going to do little other than allow New Zealanders to watch HD re-runs of Shortland Street. On the other hand, it only takes one or two New Zealanders to download content from foreign servers and mirror it, through bit torrent or other means, to everyone else in NZ.
  - mappu 14y ago
    Transfer caps are the norm here - we used to have zero-rated national traffic but that was phased out by all ISPs some time in the early 2000s. You're absolutely right, if all our piracy at least was kept on-shore via DC++ or similar, it would likely cut demand for international bandwidth in half (the same goes for probably any country). As it stands there are substantial caching servers employed by every ISP for most high-traffic static content (Youtube, Steam, onshore broadcasting...)
- Raticide 14y ago
  And still pay $1 per GB for the privilege.
hnwh 14y ago
that's right! Leave the spying on Americans for the US Govt..
beedogs 14y ago
It's fair enough, really: the US wanted exclusive spying rights.
jrockway 14y ago
If only there was some way to scramble data transmissions so that they would be unreadable to unauthorized adversaries...
- gojomo 14y ago
  I wonder: if accurately reported, does this objection signal that the USA thinks commercially-available encryption isn't sufficient to prevent Chinese spying?
  - retrogradeorbit 14y ago
    I think it may be more that commercially available encryption is not being used widely enough, or in a strong enough form. You can use 4096 bit RSA keys, but not many people do.
- ZoFreX 14y ago
  Would it really be feasible to encrypt/decrypt all data going over such a large link? What kind of latency would that add?
  - rdl 14y ago
    Surprisingly low latency, since you can parallelize. It would be expensive, but not THAT expensive. You would also want to pad the traffic to complicate/eliminate traffic analysis, but all of this could be done outside the hardware. It might cost more than buying US equipment, though. Although you could add it as you turn up waves, so not that bad upfront.
- mseebach 14y ago
  Is it practical to encrypt the entire cable as part of the interface? Or are you referring to each application encrypting itself?
SkyMarshal 14y ago
Did they even try to approach Google about this investment? Article mentioned a bunch of telecoms, but not Google, who is getting into fiber infrastructure in a big way and for whom $400m is chump change.
Volpe 14y ago
I don't understand this... Haven't we solved this problem (i.e cryptography?) Monitoring equipment in the cables don't help you solve math problems any faster?
ericgsmith 14y ago
This is very disappointing. http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/the-internaut/pacific-fibre-plug-pulled-steven-joyce-sam-morgan-vikram-kumar/ http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/the-internaut/pacific-f... - has a good summary of coverage on this issue from Radio NZ.
raarky 14y ago
This is pretty sad news. In the 90's, I heard that ihug internet used to get their bandwidth via a satellite to the USA. Do options like this still exist? Would they even be feasible for todays bandwidth requirements? It would be interesting to know what kind of options exist that could provide some much needed competition against the Southern Cross cable
- mmcnickle 14y ago
  As far as I know, bandwidth isn't the limiting factor in satellite communication, but latency is. The distance to geostationary orbit means that a round trip for a packet would take at least 500ms before factoring in networking delays etc.
- haakon666 14y ago
  Yes those options still exist, no they do not even come close to the bandwith or the pricing available on submarine cable systems. Pricing on Southern Cross cable dropped massively a few years back when PIPE's PPC-1 went from Sydney to Guam. Ending the cosy duopoly between AJC1 and SSC. It was also one of the first cables out of Australia that wasn't owned partly by an incumbent telco (Telstra, Optus etc).
  - raarky 14y ago
    It seems like a smart idea for another player step in and maybe build another NZ-AUS only cable. I must admit, the pacific was seemed hugely ambitious and I was wondering if something would come in and derail it. I never thought that espionage reasons would be one.

57 points by steve19 14y ago

It's very sad to see Pacific Fibre shut down, because they had done an incredible amount of work to get the major corporate and political players on board. They were basically putting forward the only credible plan to lay a new cable, and it's now very unlikely that the Southern Cross cable will lose its absolute monopoly (it's essentially the only connection that New Zealand has to the outside world). It's a sad day for all technology-driven businesses that want to start (or remain) in the country.

rdl 14y ago

They have some right to block this if they feel there will be espionage, but should have to pay all cost differentials required to not use Chinese equipment and investment. (NSA is welcome to invest, since they'll be wiretapping it anyway, and if European intelligence wants to subsidize ALU to provide equipment, they can have their own monitoring.) Realistically, any major fiber system is going to be monitored by virtually all intelligence agencies of major powers -- at minimum the US plus the endpoint nations, but I wouldn't be surprised if China, Russia, and maybe eventually other countries established submarine tap technology, either in the middle or at underwater branch/repeater units. Angry and sad if this kills the project entirely -- I was really looking forward to Pacific Fibre :(

malandrew 14y ago
Can you tap fiber? I thought it was only possible to tap underwater cables that emit electromagnetic waves?
- vineel 14y ago
  You may be able to tap the repeater units.
- andyjohnson0 14y ago
  If you can get access to the cable then it is possible to splice into it using fairly standard techniques. Here [1] is an article from 10 years ago that looks at what was going on back then. There is speculation [2] that the US Navy has submarines equipped with 'splicing chambers' and cable laying equipment for this purpose. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cable/115877 http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cabl... [2] http://defensetech.org/2005/02/21/jimmy-carter-super-spy/ http://defensetech.org/2005/02/21/jimmy-carter-super-spy/
  - nopassrecover 14y ago
    Wouldn't someone notice if the cable went out of commission for 10 minutes while they spliced?
    - omh 14y ago
      If your underwater fibre goes down for 10 minutes would international espionage really be the first thing that comes to mind?
      - aw3c2 14y ago
        If it comes back, then yes. I don't think fiber can have a "loose connection". It either works or it does not.
        jrockway 14y ago
        That may be true of the fiber, but it's not true of the network equipment driving the fiber. Like all computers, these occasionally need hardware or software upgrades too.
        rdl 14y ago
        You could also arrange for your subsea tapping to be at the same time as an attack (IP or electrical) on the shore station, if you really want it to be difficult to detect. Or do a real cut in one place (with a trawler), while tapping at another place. And possibly cut 5 cables at the same time... Anyone with real security requirements assumes long-haul cables and the general Internet are monitored. Point to point crypto on links is one of the easier problems to solve. (the harder problem is doing something once you've tapped -- you either need to build a multi-wave analysis box and low-bitrate exfiltration solution over an IRU you've purchased, or run your own big cable to the tap location. Much easier to tap at the cable landing site.)

mparlane 14y ago

When will we finally get rid of the monopoly on bandwidth :( I wish the government would just spend the money investing the difference. We could sell our assets for something useful!

ximeng 14y ago

400MM USD project, of which from the map about 15% of the distance is AU-NZ, 85% is NZ-US. Population of NZ is 4.4MM people, so less than 100 USD per person. Maybe a crowd sourcing effort could get some of the way there in exchange for bandwidth, or wide equity investment in a project company. Possibly some funding from users on the AU / US sides as well. Also for the security concerns, can you do an external audit of the equipment? How much does it cost for somebody to strip down some chips and do the necessary reverse engineering? You would think this could be costed out as an additional cost due to the trust gap between the countries, then the security issue becomes one which can be resolved but at a cost that is potentially not competitive rather than just a political issue where one side appears not to have interest in free trade.

46Bit 14y ago
It's not a case of some chips though. To be sure, you would have to do it to every chip you used - and even then it'd be quite possible you've missed something. Realistically this is about power rather than espionage. In a similar way to how the booming US displaced Britain of a lot of the major international cables around the turn of the 1900s, so China will want to try it.
- ximeng 14y ago
  Not sure what you mean about displacing Britain, but sounds interesting, can you elaborate? I would have thought you could structure a deal to maintain power where necessary so that China can't come in and cut off your bandwidth, but maybe not. Regarding the chips, I wouldn't have thought you need to be 100% sure, 99.9% might be good enough if you can get there by random sampling of significantly less chips than 100%. In any case, that cost analysis is what's required and that's the case e.g. Huawei are making here. There are reasons to be careful in dealings with the Chinese, but it might be better for both sides if some level of transparency can be maintained.
jeza 14y ago
Wouldn't there be a problem with vendor support? Presumedly you'd have something in the contract where they'd fix things that break when it's their fault. That would include hardware and firmware. For the later, they might just insist that remote access is the only way they can fix it. If you need to upgrade the firmware then you need to do the audit all over again. Maybe an open source firmware would help, but at the end of the day you still need a vendor you can trust.

lwat 14y ago

This sucks. The US tap cables all over the place but heaven forbid a new cable goes down with even a hint of Chinese involvement!

fungi 14y ago
fuckin a! just makes us (nz+aus) look like a client states. fuck the usa and their corporate self interest... run the cable to mexico. suspect this has far more to do with economic espionage then reds under the bed.
- retrogradeorbit 14y ago
  I'm Australian, and the thing is, for Australia at least, we _are_ a client state. I don't like it, but the facts are clear. Take for instance the leaked US State Department cables revealing Mark Arbib to be a US spy. The repercussions? Nothing. Nothing at all. Or look at how the vast majority of Australians want Australia to withdraw from Afghanistan. And yet both major parties support continued involvement. There was a Prime Minister who announced that he would withdraw the troops. And within weeks he was knifed in the back by his own party, and a new PM, one totally committed to US interests was installed. Or the permanent stationing of US troops in Darwin (closer to China). Or now in the last few days the revelation of plans being drawn up in secret to build a US nuclear weapons base in Perth, Western Australia. Or Abbots recent trip to kiss yankee ass. Or Gillard's address to congress earlier in the year. If you want to understand the real game of Australian politics, then you need to read Mark Latham's "The Latham Diaries". Australian politicians and media hated him for what he revealed in his diaries. He spilt the beans. All of them! Basically, any parliamentary front-bencher that voices opposition to US foreign policy will quickly be removed by their own party. At the end of the US-Sino currency wars, there will either be trading blocs, or a hot war. And in either case we will not be falling on the China side. The US is stepping up and saying to China 'hands off'. This is not about about espionage. This is about control. And resources. And regional strength. Things are going to get a lot hotter. Start digging that bunker!
  - gadders 14y ago

squidsoup 14y ago

New Zealand is currently undergoing a nationwide rollout of residential fibre and ISPs are proudly promoting upcoming 'ultra-fast broadband' services. The unfortunate reality is however that without investment in more overseas bandwidth, the fibre is going to do little other than allow New Zealanders to watch HD re-runs of Shortland Street.

jseliger 14y ago
the fibre is going to do little other than allow New Zealanders to watch HD re-runs of Shortland Street. On the other hand, it only takes one or two New Zealanders to download content from foreign servers and mirror it, through bit torrent or other means, to everyone else in NZ.
- mappu 14y ago
  Transfer caps are the norm here - we used to have zero-rated national traffic but that was phased out by all ISPs some time in the early 2000s. You're absolutely right, if all our piracy at least was kept on-shore via DC++ or similar, it would likely cut demand for international bandwidth in half (the same goes for probably any country). As it stands there are substantial caching servers employed by every ISP for most high-traffic static content (Youtube, Steam, onshore broadcasting...)
Raticide 14y ago
And still pay $1 per GB for the privilege.

hnwh 14y ago

that's right! Leave the spying on Americans for the US Govt..

beedogs 14y ago

It's fair enough, really: the US wanted exclusive spying rights.

jrockway 14y ago

If only there was some way to scramble data transmissions so that they would be unreadable to unauthorized adversaries...

gojomo 14y ago
I wonder: if accurately reported, does this objection signal that the USA thinks commercially-available encryption isn't sufficient to prevent Chinese spying?
- retrogradeorbit 14y ago
  I think it may be more that commercially available encryption is not being used widely enough, or in a strong enough form. You can use 4096 bit RSA keys, but not many people do.
ZoFreX 14y ago
Would it really be feasible to encrypt/decrypt all data going over such a large link? What kind of latency would that add?
- rdl 14y ago
  Surprisingly low latency, since you can parallelize. It would be expensive, but not THAT expensive. You would also want to pad the traffic to complicate/eliminate traffic analysis, but all of this could be done outside the hardware. It might cost more than buying US equipment, though. Although you could add it as you turn up waves, so not that bad upfront.
mseebach 14y ago
Is it practical to encrypt the entire cable as part of the interface? Or are you referring to each application encrypting itself?

SkyMarshal 14y ago

Did they even try to approach Google about this investment? Article mentioned a bunch of telecoms, but not Google, who is getting into fiber infrastructure in a big way and for whom $400m is chump change.

Volpe 14y ago

I don't understand this... Haven't we solved this problem (i.e cryptography?) Monitoring equipment in the cables don't help you solve math problems any faster?

ericgsmith 14y ago

This is very disappointing. http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/the-internaut/pacific-fibre-plug-pulled-steven-joyce-sam-morgan-vikram-kumar/ http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/the-internaut/pacific-f... - has a good summary of coverage on this issue from Radio NZ.

raarky 14y ago

This is pretty sad news. In the 90's, I heard that ihug internet used to get their bandwidth via a satellite to the USA. Do options like this still exist? Would they even be feasible for todays bandwidth requirements? It would be interesting to know what kind of options exist that could provide some much needed competition against the Southern Cross cable

mmcnickle 14y ago
As far as I know, bandwidth isn't the limiting factor in satellite communication, but latency is. The distance to geostationary orbit means that a round trip for a packet would take at least 500ms before factoring in networking delays etc.
haakon666 14y ago
Yes those options still exist, no they do not even come close to the bandwith or the pricing available on submarine cable systems. Pricing on Southern Cross cable dropped massively a few years back when PIPE's PPC-1 went from Sydney to Guam. Ending the cosy duopoly between AJC1 and SSC. It was also one of the first cables out of Australia that wasn't owned partly by an incumbent telco (Telstra, Optus etc).
- raarky 14y ago
  It seems like a smart idea for another player step in and maybe build another NZ-AUS only cable. I must admit, the pacific was seemed hugely ambitious and I was wondering if something would come in and derail it. I never thought that espionage reasons would be one.