It certainly sounds like an interesting development, however, I can't help but have alarm bells ringing in my head for all sorts of reasons. For a start, what if the thing falls over? It's not like you're going to have a a decent Service Level Agreement for support for hardware support from Cisco is it?
"Oh yes Sir, you have Platinum cover for your interstellar hardware. An engineer will be able to provide the replacement parts in the next scheduled Shuttle run in eight months time (assuming the weather is OK, and nothing else stops it taking off. Thank you for calling Cisco Systems"Also, IOS, like any operating system frankly, has bugs. IOS particularly though has a tendency towards quite a few because of the way in which it is developed along different functionality streams. What happens when someone finds a zero day exploit and takes it down or even worse compromises it but doesn't?
If such a scheme will allow battlefield access to satellites via the Internet that also means there is a path to those satellites for other people as well. Chinese hackers, Russian hackers, Iranian hackers, the mind boggles!
4 comments:
"for example, military operations on the ground could access live satellite telemetry on the battlefield."
They do, already. They just don't do it over the public internet. The technologies in UK and US military satellites are pretty much identical to those in their commercial equivalents, only, generally, somewhat behind the times. Military data-comms, satellite or otherwise, is now pretty much all over IP-based networks because the kit is so much cheaper, even when you put it in an ugly green or grey box.
S-E
Agreed.. I probably should've have made the point that they do it already. The whole idea of using the public internet for such things just seems crazy to me though..
The degree to which you can get from the public internet to some quite sensitive areas of government internal networks is quite worrying.
Without considering the (x)GSI, both the UK RLI and the US NIPRNET are directly internet connected (in as much as any professionally managed commercial network is.) The corresponding 'secure' networks, the SLI and SIPRNET are also, to a degree then, internet connected as they have links to the low-security networks. It may take some knowledge, a bit of time, and considerable trial and error to get a generic exploit onto the secure networks but it has been done.
Reminds me of the old Marcus Ranum "emergency firewall" - a box containing an axe, with a non-conductive plastic handle, for cutting the relevant power leads.
S-E
Will it have WiFi?
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