Why Is Russia's Suspected Internet Cable Spy Ship In the Mid-Atlantic? (forbes.com) 107
"Russia's controversial intelligence ship Yantar has been operating in the Caribbean, or mid-Atlantic, since October," writes defense analyst H I Sutton this week in Forbes.
He adds that the ship "is suspected by Western navies of being involved in operations on undersea communications cables." Significantly, she appears to be avoiding broadcasting her position via AIS (Automated Identification System). I suspect that going dark on AIS is a deliberate measure to frustrate efforts to analyse her mission. She has briefly used AIS while making port calls, where it would be expected by local authorities, for example while calling at Trinidad on November 8 and again on November 28. However in both cases she disappeared from AIS tracking sites almost as soon as she left port...
Yantar has been observed conducting search patterns in the vicinity of internet cables, and there is circumstantial evidence that she has been responsible for internet outages, for example off the Syrian coast in 2016.
Yantar is "allegedly an 'oceanographic research vessel'," notes Popular Mechanics, in a mid-November article headlined "Why is Russia's spy ship near American waters?"
A study by British think tank Policy Exchange mentioned that the ship carried two submersibles capable of tapping undersea cables for information -- or outright cutting them, the Forbes article points out. "Whether Yantar's presence involves undersea cables, or some other target of interest to the Russians, it will be of particular interest to U.S. forces."
He adds that the ship "is suspected by Western navies of being involved in operations on undersea communications cables." Significantly, she appears to be avoiding broadcasting her position via AIS (Automated Identification System). I suspect that going dark on AIS is a deliberate measure to frustrate efforts to analyse her mission. She has briefly used AIS while making port calls, where it would be expected by local authorities, for example while calling at Trinidad on November 8 and again on November 28. However in both cases she disappeared from AIS tracking sites almost as soon as she left port...
Yantar has been observed conducting search patterns in the vicinity of internet cables, and there is circumstantial evidence that she has been responsible for internet outages, for example off the Syrian coast in 2016.
Yantar is "allegedly an 'oceanographic research vessel'," notes Popular Mechanics, in a mid-November article headlined "Why is Russia's spy ship near American waters?"
A study by British think tank Policy Exchange mentioned that the ship carried two submersibles capable of tapping undersea cables for information -- or outright cutting them, the Forbes article points out. "Whether Yantar's presence involves undersea cables, or some other target of interest to the Russians, it will be of particular interest to U.S. forces."
talk about man in the middle (Score:1)
hope your crypto is working
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well.. for who.
anyways if they do break the cable US forces for sure know it was them. it's just the civvies that won't know for sure. usa knows where the cables are and where the ship is.
Tapping (Score:1)
It should be fairly straightforward to encrypt all the communication going across one of these cables, making tapping impossible.
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making tapping impossible.
Less probable.
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Less probable.
No, encryption has nothing to do with tapping.
Unless the attacker decides not to bother tapping the line at all because it's encrypted, then there's no connection between the two.
And frankly, knowing it's encrypted won't stop anyone with the resources to tap an undersea cable. They'll do it, scoop up everything and get to work decrypting it, which they'll eventually be able to do. Sooner or later.
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You are making a pedantic distinction over trivialities of word definition.
Wiretapping is usually understood to mean listening in on a conversation (or other communication). If you physically intercept the the communication link, but because of encryption you can't listen in, in a very real sense you are not tapping.
Merriam Webster, [merriam-webster.com] for example: wiretapping is "interception of the contents of communication through a secret connection to the telephone line of one whose conversations are to be monitored usu
Re:Tapping (Score:5, Informative)
If you physically intercept the the communication link, but because of encryption you can't listen in, in a very real sense you are not tapping.
That's just wrong. You are tapping the line, you just can't understand what's being said on the line. You have to tap the line before you can decrypt or understand what's being said.
If you can't decrypt it, then you are not intercepting the contents.
No, that's not correct. In fact it's ridiculously wrong. The word "intercept" doesn't have anything to do with readability. You can intercept traffic you can't read.
Let's say you tap a line and record the (encrypted) communications, even though you can't decrypt the traffic.
A year later, you find the key and now you can decrypt the traffic. Are you going to jump up and say, "Hey, I just tapped their line!"?
No, you'll say "I just decrypted the data we intercepted from the tap we put on the undersea cable last year."
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A year later, you find the key and now you can decrypt the traffic
Except you won't find the key in a year. This is not some Tom Cruise movie.
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Maybe not through brute force, but perhaps through espionage or some other leaks?
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There have been flaws discovered in all forms of encryption, over the years. These flaws have been shown to weaken those forms of encryption, often leading to their deprecation.
Pre-0-day vulnerabilities abound. To assume that the *current* form of encryption you use is safe, is not logical. It's only safe from those that don't know what vulnerabilities surely exist, but have not been discovered by the public at large. Granted, some vulnerabilities are man-in-the-middle required, but others did assist in
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There have been flaws discovered in all forms of encryption, over the years.
Please provide a link to the flaws discovered in AES256.
The NSA, and similar agencies spend trillions on hiring encryption specialists right out of University, and just let them play, theorize, and learn
That knowledge works both ways. The NSA can no doubt propose encryption that they would consider unbreakable.
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Please provide a link to the flaws discovered in AES256.
We will as soon as they're discovered. Or are you claiming that AES256 is perfect and has no flaws and will never be broken?
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No, but if someone is claiming that all forms of encryption have flaws, then I'd like to see some proof, otherwise it's just intellectual laziness.
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Maybe not through brute force, but perhaps through espionage or some other leaks?
Exactly. They don't necessarily have to crack something to get the key. It may just be a matter of money or idealism or any of a hundred other ways.
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They don't necessarily have to crack something to get the key. It may just be a matter of paying some money or appealing to their idealism or any of a hundred other ways.
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What part of "pedantic distinction over trivialities of word definition" did you need to be explained?
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What part of "pedantic distinction over trivialities of word definition" did you need to be explained?
The kind you apparently don't understand, and therefore use to deflect from the fact that you've been shown to be wrong.
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You are making a pedantic distinction over trivialities of word definition.
Wiretapping is usually understood to mean listening in on a conversation (or other communication)
But "literally" is generally understood to mean "figuratively" too, and is documented in the same source you also quoted from.
I'd have to agree with JustAnotherOldGuy, you can tap a line if it's data is plain text or encrypted either way, the data itself makes no difference to the physical act of getting data off a wire.
I also disagree with your stance in whole, a language of words where not a single one of them has any meaning would both be very useless and pointless to bother with.
I prefer words to mean s
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If we're going to have a contest if who can piss pedantry further up the wall than the other guy, if a language is a means of conveying information or meaning between entities, then a language of words without meaning wouldn't actually be a language, would it?
Re: Tapping (Score:3)
"If you can't decrypt it, then you are not intercepting the contents."
With your bizarre quantum interception logic, when you decrypt a communication years later, the interception goes back in time and happens when you tapped the cable?
LOL... bruh, please.
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You're also carefully slipping between the word being used ("tapping") and the word you're interested in ("wiretapping"). As a method of getting something out of a conduit, "tapping" has a subset which involves wires, electrical currents and voltages which is called, in some countries, "wiretapping". For example, I routinely tap into fluid-filled pipes to extract information from pressure variations in the pipe's contents. I also tap
Re:Tapping (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll do it, scoop up everything and get to work decrypting it, which they'll eventually be able to do
Modern symmetric encryption is pretty much unbreakable, and can be upgraded to a stronger version when needed. And figuring out the contents of 20 year old data is pretty much going to be useless. Recording all the data is going to be tricky too, especially on board a ship.
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And figuring out the contents of 20 year old data is pretty much going to be useless.
The NSA, CIA, FBI, etc routinely record and store stuff they can't read. They hope to read it one day whether by cracking or by getting
Unbuttoning old communications even from long ago can be immensely valuable in figuring out what happened and who did what, and then using that information to move forward and fill in more of the story/puzzle.
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That needs a deal more work I knew people who were collecting petabyte data sets daily in the mid-winter North Atlantic in the 1990s. You might call it magic, but we called it broadband seismic.
Of course, you couldn't read the data in the office. Not until the regular helicopter arrived to change crew members and swap new blank reels of tape for old valuable rolls of tape. Up thread, I mention traffic analysis. Standard Operating
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Perhaps AI could be trained to be really good at breaking encryption?
Straightforward, but loses 20% capacity (Score:2)
It would be pretty straightforward, and it would reduce the capacity by roughly 20%. The exact overhead depends on many assumptions. Best case you lose about 10%.
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Without padding, I can read and potentially change the plaintext. It's a very big deal. The padding had better be done right, too. Get it wrong and you've got POODLE, Lucky 13, etc.
Anyway you've got the headers even if you wanted easily breakable encryption for the illusion of security.
Fortunately, anything sensitive should already be encrypted well before it gets to the transatlantic cable.
Re:Straightforward, but loses 20% capacity (Score:5, Informative)
They just need to pair up MACsec transceivers at each end of each connection, and the overhead is more like 1%.
If you only multicast video (Score:2)
About half of the frames on the internet are about 88 bytes - all those acks. Add 24-56 bytes of Macsec overhead, that's something like 30% overhead on half the frames.
The other half of the frames average about 500-600 bytes. So around 5%-10% overhead on those. We assume that all of the equipment involved can handle the extra large frames for large transfers. If instead adding the Macsec requires fragmentation, it gets worse.
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Encryption now would reduce the ability to sell "free" data as a capacity upgrade...
Re: If you only multicast video (Score:2)
You assume that packets are enctrypted individually. If encryption/decription happens at both ends of the cable one can encrypt the data stream to reduce the encryption overhead.
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Can you think of why encrypting billions of packets, and terabytes of data, with one key would be a very bad idea?
Do you think there might be a reason IPSec etc encrypt packets? What happens when packet loss is 0.01%? How much data needs to be flushed from the entire cable and resent several thousand times per second?
What does this do to security and do attacks like Sweet32 teach us anything?
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Can you think of why encrypting billions of packets, and terabytes of data, with one key would be a very bad idea?
If your encryption is good, it doesn't matter that it's with a single key.
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No encryption is secure. Just because we don't know of the latest vulnerability, latest weakness with 'what we use', doesn't mean it isn't there. One must assume it is broken (by someone), vulnerable in some way, leading to decryption.
Its only value is to 'raise the bar' for the 'common man' to fuck with you, and perhaps for wide-spread, easy surveillance. That's it.
State-actors have specific targets of interest. Immense resources can be placed on decrypting their traffic. When you spend billions (and
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One must assume it is broken (by someone), vulnerable in some way, leading to decryption.
By that logic, one must also assume that changing your key doesn't help.
State-actors have specific targets of interest. Immense resources can be placed on decrypting their traffic.
In this case, state-actors also have immense resources to make sure their encryption is safe.
That's not the only issue (Score:2)
"Break in key and get everything" is ONE issue.
Another issue is that the more data I have encrypted with a key, the easier it is to break it. By a very significant amount of "easier". Again, see Sweet32 for an example.
I recently broke RSA using a similar concept of reuse (see Chinese Remainder Theorem). The system had that design flaw and the reuse allowed me to decrypt the messages. I'm not a state actor, I'm one guy. I can and do execute attacks like Sweet32 and CRT when someone has poor encryption pr
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State-actor level resources are needed when the encryption is done right, with perfect forward secrecy
Obviously. But that's not a problem for a transatlantic cable where the USA has great interest in keeping it secure.
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And you're suggesting that because the USA has a great interest in keeping it secure, they should intentionally misconfigure it such that even *I* can break it? Anyone iny masters-level encryption class could break it if you use the same key for terabytes of data, and we can control some of the data by generating our own cross-Atlantic traffic. That's exactly the kind of thing professor Lee would assign.
If I'm understanding you correctly, your logic is "it's very important, so let's make sure we do it com
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Add 24-56 bytes of Macsec overhead,
Its 24 bytes per frame. 32 bytes is the maximum overhead; only if the use of a secure channel identifier is required and enabled.
half of the frames on the internet are about 88 bytes - all those acks
TCP can and will carry data payloads back with ACKs; this is 88 bytes only if a return direction is not being utilized during a TCP connection --
what you're saying only applies to the side where a transmission path is barely being used; Well, yeah.
If you only use a g
Thanks (Score:2)
Thanks. Everything you said makes sense except I want yo make sure I'm understanding what you're saying here:
> TCP can and will carry data payloads back with ACKs; this is 88 bytes only if a return direction is not being utilized during a TCP connection
You're talking about when there is significant data flow in both directions of a single TCP session, correct?
Most of the internet traffic is of course the web. Most of the bandwidth being video. Send a 24-byte request, get a 30,000,000 byte response. That
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Nah, just use the cables route Twitter traffic. Then invite the Russians to tap the hell out it, they'll gain nothing of import.
Ask Machine-Gun Kelly (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you rob banks?
Because that's where the money is.
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Because that's where the money is.
Willie Sutton, he's my Spirit Animal.
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This is probably misdirection though. I mean if the media is reporting it then they didn't do a very good job of hiding where the tap is, and presumably a Western sub will be along soon to check their work and remove it if necessary.
It's cable tapping even a thing these days? I mean it wouldn't be hard to just encrypt the whole link and make any tap worthless.
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"It's cable tapping even a thing these days? I mean it wouldn't be hard to just encrypt the whole link and make any tap worthless."
It's not for listening. They attach a sub to the cable with hundreds of little bots with tiny keyboards posting fake news on Facebook. So nobody can tell from where it comes.
Re:Ask Machine-Gun Kelly (Score:4, Interesting)
Myabe they are removing taps put by the US on cables going to Cuba? And being obvious about their location to send a message they found the US with its hand in the cookie jar
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That does sound plausible, although again you have to wonder why the US is able to tap these cables which should be encrypted. I suppose the US has the legal power to compel disclosure of any encryption keys.
Long term surprises. (Score:1)
There's no particular reason that a cable cutter couldn't be left behind on a timer to provide a little more deniability.
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That's what I was thinking. If we retaliate against the Russians for interfering with the US elections and cut them off they can retaliate by cutting us off. In that case, I would hope that a US Sub would accidentally sink that ship.
Nobody likes 'Rules for thee, not for me' (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nobody likes 'Rules for thee, not for me' (Score:5, Funny)
Can't have state "prestige" without an enemy to declare themselves the savior from.
Flip the sides, repeat.
Re:Nobody likes 'Rules for thee, not for me' (Score:4, Funny)
The Five Eyes already tapped most of the undersea cables and everything else, not sure how anyone can get mad Russia wants the same access.
Yeah, but the Russians turned off their Automated Identification System on their cable cutter, so we don't know where it is.
That's dangerous!
One of our cable cutters could crash into it while trying to cut the same cable!
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Hey, look! It's whataboutism! Nice post, comrade!
Re: Nobody likes 'Rules for thee, not for me' (Score:1)
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Recall STORMBREW, OAKSTAR, BLARNEY and FAIRVIEW?
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Venezuela (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems like a hazard to navigation (Score:1)
It should be sunk to prevent any accidents.
MAGA (Score:1)
Why indeed? It's all hands on deck time for Team Orange.
Why is Russian Hysteria turned up to eleven again? (Score:1)
Reddit et al., are all-a-buzz about Russians now. What happened to Ukraine hysteria? Isn't Russian hysteria so-last-year now?
Re:Why is Russian Hysteria turned up to eleven aga (Score:5, Insightful)
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Want to win a US election? Talk to more US citizens who can vote in many different states...
Winning...
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People all over the USA didn't bother to vote and stayed home.
Not voting came first.
Hillary came second on popular vote. (but that means nothing Trump won where it counts)
Trump came third.
Nice thriving democracy you got there...
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AC "People all over the USA didn't bother to vote and stayed home."... That was the freedom they have.
Again AC, want to win, talk to more US citizens in actual US states and win the needed states
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> Interfering in our elections is a pretty big threat
You should see how much they spent on FB and Twitter ads!
https://youtu.be/LhxMvmX9WlA [youtu.be]
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You should put a disclaimer next to the link for that video! The globalism-uber-alles types who down-rated my preceding comment will be triggered by that video.
Anyhow, right from the Steele Dossier we have an idea what that economic super power Russia is spending for its intelligence operations: "Tens of thousands of dollar." http://thesteeledossier.com/
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the American interference in the current British election is really pissing off the Cons. Just about every time Trump opens his mouth and says something about Britain, the polls move a couple of percent from Conservative to Labour.
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Uh...U.S. domestic oil and gas production has put a dent into Russia's oil plans, even Putin admitted it. If you were talking about Iraq, nope Iranians got it. If you were talking about Syria, yup, we're defending the 10 barrels they have left. The U.S. gave Kuwait back to the fat boys in the robes. In my opinion, the U.S. should have given it to the Palestinians. It would have gotten them away from Israel and given the Saudis indigestion. The U.S. hasn't taken Saudi Arabia yet, and Trump hates Muslims. Com
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Russia has been a threat to the US and other countries much longer than that. Since the 19th Century (well, not the US in the 19th Century, since the US then was of no importance to Russia before WW2), at least....
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Of course, Slashdot is not "the real world" but: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/12/08/0359211/reddit-bans-61-accounts-citing-coordinated-russian-campaign-to-interfere-in-uk-vote [slashdot.org].
for the same reason the us spy sub did (Score:2)
Be a shame (Score:2)
It'd be a shame if something happened to it, like if it got blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean.
Blinded by hype (Score:1)
As a everything science lifer, I am a bit puzzled by lack of imagination manifested in each and every discussion on Yantar and generally Russian oceanographic vessels.
People blinded by "gas station masquerading as a state" rubish are forgetting those people may be smarter than "two minutes attention span" commenters can fathom. Maybe same people think they, or maybe MIC, already know everything worth knowing, or possible to know? Maybe they think Russians can only do same things already invented or done by
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Why disable the transponders then?
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Why disable the transponders then?
If I was her captain, and I assure you I am not :), I will probably find gazillion reasons to turn my transponder off. If not for anything else, then to spook people watching my every step.
Every day practice shows transponder is something used at captain's whim. Especially when out of shipping routes. Every other day you find in news this or other ship or aircraft did turn her/its/whatever transponder. Try googling something like "baltic sea transponder".
Why? (Score:5, Funny)
I want to know how come the US (and Russian and probably ever other major government) can tap a fiber cable miles under the ocean without either end of the fiber being able to detect it yet my ISP can't repair a broken fiber that's 8 feet under ground without days of pissing and moaning?
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Cost.
The government can do pretty much anything, including an undetected tapping of undersea cables, if they’re willing to pay the cost to do it. They want the ability to intercept or disrupt communications, and they don’t want people to know it’s them. They’ll pay that price (and have already done so many times, no doubt).
Your cable company simply doesn’t want to pay the extra costs to provide uninterrupted service while conducting repairs.
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Re "my ISP can't repair"
Thats having a truck, crew, van, team in every city ready to "work" hard 24/7... just to be ready for a cut in services.
No "ISP"/"telco" wants to pay for such teams waiting 24/7 on standby.
So they pay a wage to just enough staff to keep the telco working within the "contract" while making a profit.
Not setting a 24/7 business product? No van waiting.
Consumer service? Thats "days" to get "the" one team thats doing work now ready for
The Caribbean is "mid-Atlantic" now? (Score:2)
Thought that would be further North and East, huh?
Of course, since it hosts mini-subs capable of going down 20000 ft. I guess it can mess with cables just about anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
An idea of course dreamed-up originally by the Christians In Action during the 70s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Meanwhile, not to worry, at 15 Kt. and no armament, I'm sure the USAF or USN will eliminate this "threat" within hours of it being deemed vital to do so.
Probably being used as a training target
Putting out explosives? (Score:3)
So maybe they're putting remote-control explosives on lines? If war would ever break out, one of the first priorities is to disrupt enemy communications...
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Russia can do nothing against all the commercial satellite networks can it...
They are all private property and so far up in space.... well away from anything Russia has the tracking and range for....
The Russians are going to have to answer to the Wests commercial satellite networks... if they did stop the US and NATO war time communication networ
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Every landing station is mapped...
Even the picturesque GCHQ splitter ones...
The only way around that is to buy in bulk from the satellites already up.
Fall back to very traditional methods of global communications?
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This was exactly my first thought. I'm pretty sure that any attempt to penetrate today's fiber optic cables would be detected. But placing remotely triggerable explosive charges is probable undetectable. I wonder what method would be used to trigger them though.
I suppose it is the same reason (Score:3)
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Russia "bad"...
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Good idea, how do they overcome encryption? (Score:2)
Good idea, how do they overcome all the different and multiple layers of encryption?
MiM can't be the answer.
Really interesting things in oceans and sees (Score:2)
No AIS? (Score:1)
Would be a shame if the vessel were sunk. People not knowing it's there and all.