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The Internet China Communications United States

The New US-China Proxy War Over Undersea Internet Cables (reuters.com) 43

400 undersea cables carry 95% of the world's international internet traffic, reports Reuters (citing figures from Washington-based telecommunications research firm TeleGeography).

But now there's "a growing proxy war between the United States and China over technologies that could determine who achieves economic and military dominance for decades to come." In February, American subsea cable company SubCom LLC began laying a $600-million cable to transport data from Asia to Europe, via Africa and the Middle East, at super-fast speeds over 12,000 miles of fiber running along the seafloor. That cable is known as South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 6, or SeaMeWe-6 for short. It will connect a dozen countries as it snakes its way from Singapore to France, crossing three seas and the Indian Ocean on the way. It is slated to be finished in 2025.

It was a project that slipped through China's fingers....

The Singapore-to-France cable would have been HMN Tech's biggest such project to date, cementing it as the world's fastest-rising subsea cable builder, and extending the global reach of the three Chinese telecom firms that had intended to invest in it. But the U.S. government, concerned about the potential for Chinese spying on these sensitive communications cables, ran a successful campaign to flip the contract to SubCom through incentives and pressure on consortium members.... It's one of at least six private undersea cable deals in the Asia-Pacific region over the past four years where the U.S. government either intervened to keep HMN Tech from winning that business, or forced the rerouting or abandonment of cables that would have directly linked U.S. and Chinese territories....

Justin Sherman, a fellow at the Cyber Statecraft Initiative of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, told Reuters that undersea cables were "a surveillance gold mine" for the world's intelligence agencies. "When we talk about U.S.-China tech competition, when we talk about espionage and the capture of data, submarine cables are involved in every aspect of those rising geopolitical tensions," Sherman said.

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The New US-China Proxy War Over Undersea Internet Cables

Comments Filter:
  • by DoubleJ1024 ( 1287512 ) on Saturday March 25, 2023 @05:42PM (#63399213)
    Release the Krak...underwater backhoes!!!
  • If all traffic over the links is encrypted, what does spying on the links gain them? I don't mean to be dense here, I just really don't know.
    • Traffic patterns, routing, even if it's quiet, it's all of value to some algorithm.

    • Plus better to connect on land like say an AT&T building in a nondescript room.

    • Encrypted data is being stored, with the expectation that in a decade or two quantum or other computing advancements will enable decrypting the current encryption. I forget the term, Veritasium did a video in the past week on it. Looked it up, "store now, decrypt later": SNDL.

      Combine that with more advanced "AI" language models being able to process that data and quantify it...

      Oh, and of course that's with abilities we're currently aware of/are happening, whereas state actors likely have more advanced ab

      • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25, 2023 @07:10PM (#63399337)
        yeah no, it would cost 10's of billions to store what is being carried across those cables in the dim hope of maybe one day being able to read some of it. call bullshit on that.
        • The IP addresses on the traffic aren't encrypted, so you can theoretically only store the traffic between nodes that you care about.

          Not that quantum computing is going to happen in the next few decades, but knowing who is communicating with who is valuable information (that's the metadata).
          • by thogard ( 43403 )

            The data that flows on the fibers is all encrypted and there is always data being sent. The large routers now all encrypted the lower level bitstreams so and TLS packet hits the ISP router, it gets routed to the overseas link and encrypted sent as part of a 400 gb link which then gets handed to the subsea transit provider who encrypted again before it get sent down the undersea line.

            As far as storing the data, a typical new project is about 128 terabits. That would require about a half a million dollars i

            • Cool, thanks
            • by fgouget ( 925644 )

              The data that flows on the fibers is all encrypted and there is always data being sent. The large routers now all encrypted the lower level bitstreams so and TLS packet hits the ISP router, it gets routed to the overseas link and encrypted sent as part of a 400 gb link which then gets handed to the subsea transit provider who encrypted again before it get sent down the undersea line.

              I can't quite parse this sentence but I believe it can be summarized as PPVPN [wikipedia.org] and their many variants.

    • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      If all traffic over the links is encrypted, what does spying on the links gain them?

      They hoover up all the information, and store it until the time when better decryption algorithms have been discovered. Not all information goes out of date.

    • Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) starts with access. With access, it is safe to assume nations will always have the capability to intercept some set of targeted communications. TLS 1.3 makes life for the interceptor harder, but there is no security answer to a stolen private key.
  • by crow ( 16139 ) on Saturday March 25, 2023 @06:30PM (#63399279) Homepage Journal

    Super-fast speeds over 12,000 miles of fibre is going to be be a ping time of about 200ms before you spend any time in processing. My research (i.e., I Googled it) says that fibre runs about a third slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. So if you really want fast, you need to both minimize the distance and maximize the speed, such as using microwave or laser links. The fastest way to get packets between Asia and Europe might be to use something like Starlink with direct satellite laser links. (Note that I said, "like" because the system as it is now isn't going to work that way.)

    Of course, what they're talking about is super high bandwidth, which isn't necessarily super fast. The'll send massive amounts of data over that link; it just won't get there that fast.

    Remember, never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of hard drives; it just isn't very fast.

    • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Well as the summary says it touches several places along the way, so while it might not be the quickest (in time) between Europe and Asia it certainly increases capacity ( and maybe even reduces distance) between any if the end points and the intermediate points and certenly between any two intermediate points.
    • Latency will be noticeable on a video call, would be bad for gaming, but for data/movies/etc it doesn't matter at all. Can you really tell that your movie started 0.2 seconds slower? Latency has almost no impact on throughput, so after the initial 0.2 second delay the movie plays as if you were on a short fiber.
    • The fastest way to get packets between Asia and Europe might be to use something like Starlink with direct satellite laser links. (Note that I said, "like" because the system as it is now isn't going to work that way.)

      Did someone call for a space laser [wccftech.com]?

    • Super-fast speeds over 12,000 miles of fibre is going to be be a ping time of about 200ms before you spend any time in processing. My research (i.e., I Googled it) says that fibre runs about a third slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. So if you really want fast,

      ...obviously you need an evacuated tunnel that you can shoot lasers down without a fiber. ;)

  • Unless there's active sabotage going on, it's not a war.
  • This was an issue we dealt with in the 1990's, and for decades before and after that.

    Today we know all undersea cables will be cut and tapped in the first week.

  • Asks Elon Musk.

"To take a significant step forward, you must make a series of finite improvements." -- Donald J. Atwood, General Motors

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