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NSA Tapping Underwater Fiber Optics
An anonymous reader submitted an interesting story about the NSA
splicing fiber optics under water in order to eavesdrop on digital traffic. This happened years ago, so who knows what they're doing today. Not surprisingly, apparently actually getting the tap is relatively easy. Sifting through the zillions of bits and finding something useful is a little trickier.
All one would have to crack into would be the repeater amplifiers that are placed probably every 160km in the cable. A college EE grad could design a sniffer that wouldn't incur a voltage drop or induce noise in the amplifiers. Done this way, the actual fiber strands wouldn't even be touched. It's anybody's guess how they get the resulting data out, but it's probably by wireless transmission, perhaps with a small subsurface bouy and a Naval patrol assignment.
Dear lord, it sounds to me like the NSA is some sort of spy agency! Does the United States government know about this?
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
The US Navy is still doing this. At the end of Blind Man's Bluff - upstairs somewhere, the author talks about the fact that a couple (2-3) Navy subs that have been specially modified with diving chambers keep getting Presidental Unit Citations for classified missions, every year. Since the Subs that first tapped these lines were specially modified and got PUCs for classified missions...the author suspects it's still going on.
I think the Navy also did it in the Barrets Sea to the north of Murmansk as well.
It's really interesting how the Navy thought to tap into cable. A Navy Officer remebered boating with his dad on the Mississippi and seeing signs that marked cable runs under water, so he talked head of Naval Operations into sending subs in to see if the Russians had the same sort of signs. They did and the rest is history.
Assume that everyone uses PGP for their email, and that it is impractical for the NSA to crack PGP encrypted messages. The NSA will still want to tap every data communications link that they can get access to. The reason is traffic analysis. You can get a lot of useful information by analyzing the source, destination and volume of messages. This is already a common intelligence gathering and criminal investigation technique when applied to call logs from telephone switching systems.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Word to the wise, encrypt your critical traffic since a good deal of internet communications is vulnerable to being intercepted at NAPs (Network Access Points) as well at other major connection points. Private peering arrangements routed outside of NAP (ie. MAE-East, MAE-West, etc) facilities can reduce risk in some instances, but typically can't eliminate all risk since the majority of internet traffic travels through at least one major NAP; and the exact connections, etc are often unknown to all parties, even to the people who operate the NAP facilities.
:-)
In closing, governments, etc are typically years ahead of the media and common-knowledge in regards to intellegence gathering. NAP tapping is never mentioned in the media, but I'm sure it's happening. Be forewarned
Isn't it ironic that the NSA stands for the very thing thay, behind our backs and behind the scenes, they attempt, and perhaps succeed, to invade?
The NSA has two jobs -- one is to breach foreign information security, but their other is to keep US information secure. So it isn't ironic -- they just have to know security from both sides.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
has anyone else wondered how the NSA is shipping the data? wouldn't you need the equivalent of another fibre-optic cable running alongside to transport the data back to virginia?
considering that laying an optical cable is somewhere O(1e9) $ and not trivial to lay undetected, it must be quite a feat...
"I'm not going to sit here and dissuade you from your views" - Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden
"Oh, Kent, I'd be lying if I said my men weren't committing crimes"- Homer J. Simpson
It isn't known whether the cable's operator detected the intrusion, though former NSA officials say they believe it went unnoticed.
When I was a freshman in college and had to take a class on telecommunications we had an engineer from Southwestern Bell come out and explain these new fangled fiber optics. One of the claims he made was that they would be nigh-impossible to tap because the splice could be detected at either end rather easily due to latency issues.
So my question is this: Anyone have any ideas how the heck they might have done this? Whatever the device was, it seems it'd have to be very, very fast at whatever it does. The only thing I can imagine is some sort of intelligent lens that reads signals while they pass through it.
Scary, whatever it is.
- Rev.Good thing the Ex-Soviet Union didn't have the tech, apparently, or the NSA would have then found their own monitoring cable tapped, and have to install another tap and cable on the USSR's return cable, which would then be tapped by the Reds, and so on, and so on...
The Wall Street Journal just ran this something similar.. (haven't checked the zdnet doc lagging on dl's) [mirror]
Anyways I doubt its impossible for the NSA to splice it, however when companies take the corrective measures to ensure this won't happen what are they going to do...
Example, say a company takes the time, and money to protect their fiber say inside inexpensive pvc pipes or something similar, who does the government expect to blame when a company finds out that 100 miles away from any shoreline, their casing has been breached? Certainly its not Joe Fisherman doing this.
Anyways aside from that nothing is going to help them when that fiber line is carrying IPSec data all the way through the connections, along with messages that have been encrypted before even being sent. So many people have little to worry about.
For those interested in Crypto Equipment and such (especially those working in the ISP segments) you can check out the Crypto Equipment Guide. Hopefully many companies will start looking at their clients (whether their employees, subscribers, etc.) more serious. I know Earthlink is taking that approach.
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Submarine cable interception
Submarine cables now play a dominant role in international telecommunications, since - in contrast to the limited bandwidth available for space systems - optical media offer seemingly unlimited capacity. Save where cables terminate in countries where telecommunications operators provide Comint access (such as the UK and the US), submarine cables appear intrinsically secure because of the nature of the ocean environment. 49. In October 1971, this security was shown not to exist. A US submarine, Halibut, visited the Sea of Okhotsk off the eastern USSR and recorded communications passing on a military cable to the Khamchatka Peninsula Halibut was equipped with a deep diving chamber, fully in view on the submarine's stern. The chamber was described by the US Navy as a "deep submergence rescue vehicle". The truth was that the "rescue vehicle" was welded immovably to the submarine. Once submerged, deep-sea divers exited the submarine and wrapped tapping coils around the cable. Having proven the principle, USS Halibut returned in 1972 and laid a high capacity recording pod next to the cable. The technique involved no physical damage and was unlikely to have been readily detectable.
The Okhotsk cable tapping operation continued for ten years, involving routine trips by three different specially equipped submarines to collect old pods and lay new ones; sometimes, more than one pod at a time. New targets were added in 1979. That summer, a newly converted submarine called USS Parche travelled from San Francisco under the North Pole to the Barents Sea, and laid a new cable tap near Murmansk. Its crew received a presidential citation for their achievement. The Okhotsk cable tap ended in 1982, after its location was compromised by a former NSA employee who sold information about the tap, codenamed IVY BELLS, to the Soviet Union. One of the IVY BELLS pods is now on display in the Moscow museum of the former KGB. The cable tap in the Barents Sea continued in operation, undetected, until tapping stopped in 1992.
During 1985, cable-tapping operations were extended into the Mediterranean, to intercept cables linking Europe to West Africa. (30) After the cold war ended, the USS Parche was refitted with an extended section to accommodate larger cable tapping equipment and pods. Cable taps could be laid by remote control, using drones. USS Parche continues in operation to the present day, but the precise targets of its missions remain unknown. The Clinton administration evidently places high value on its achievements, Every year from 1994 to 1997, the submarine crew has been highly commended.(31) Likely targets may include the Middle East, Mediterranean, eastern Asia, and South America. The United States is the only naval power known to have deployed deep-sea technology for this purpose.
Miniaturised inductive taps recorders have also been used to intercept underground cables.(32) Optical fibre cables, however, do not leak radio frequency signals and cannot be tapped using inductive loops. NSA and other Comint agencies have spent a great deal of money on research into tapping optical fibres, reportedly with little success. But long distance optical fibre cables are not invulnerable. The key means of access is by tampering with optoelectronic "repeaters" which boost signal levels over long distances. It follows that any submarine cable system using submerged optoelectronic repeaters cannot be considered secure from interception and communications intelligence activity.
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There were two taps: one in the Okhotsk Sea (in the Pacific), and one in the Barents Sea (north of Scandinavia). The traitor only gave away the Okhotsk Sea tap.
(source, for those who are interested, is Blind Man's Bluff by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, a truly excellent book about undersea espionage during the Cold War).
Ray
just be be precise, this was done inthe Artic ocean.
NOVA had a show (Submarines, Secrets, and Spies) on it back in Jabuary 1999. See the transcript here
Maybe things have changed, but according to the special it was maybe halfway there when something went wrong:
It was the highest priority and the biggest budget item in the intelligence budget in the late Reagan administration. They spent about a billion dollars on it, and then it all went away, because of one guy, Pelton.
NARRATOR: Ronald Pelton was analyst working for the National Security Agency who was convicted of spying for the KGB. The on-line tap was one of the operations he compromised.
So this looks like old news, and it might not even be accurate.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
But the modern effort has to do with fiber.
Aside with sheer volume of data, they also have this issue:
Dust or seawater in the submerged chamber could ruin an exposed fiber. Making a surreptitious tap of a live cable would also require circumventing the electrical charge--usually around 10,000 volts--which is used to power the devices that keep the speeding light beams strong.
This is know a "technical difficulties"
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I think it was CNN that did a whole documentry on the story. The ZDNet article seems to leave out one small detail -- a Russian double agent at the NSA gave the project away to the Soviets, and billions of dollars were lost on the project. Cool article though, at least they touched on some technical theories behind it.