Slashdot Mirror
The Search for Secret Shuttle Parts
Slashdot readers have been submitting this story about the search
for secret shuttle parts with all sorts of insane conspiracy theories attached to their cut & paste of the URL. It's apparently just the box that handled encryption for messages, so of course Uncle Sam wants it back. Quite the needle in a haystack tho.
Any system that requires the encryption system to be secret can't be that much good. I can understand why they want to find it, but worst case is they switch over to another system of which the US must have dozens of suitable candidates.
It's an encryption unit. It encrypts stuff. So what?! They probably change these things now and then anyway for security reasons, plus I would imagine all the craft use different keys and encryption etc. Then again, the Nazis using Enigma used keys like 'Hitler' - nothing like being too cryptic.
The thing that gets me the most though, is the fact that people are selling parts on eBay. It had to happen I suppose, but its just what I would see as being incredibly sick. Are people really that much of a slave to the mighty Dollar that they must do that? Totally sick.
Why are they encrypting the messages anyway? I thought the missions were public, and AFAIK, hams have been listening to radio communication between the ISS and the ground for a long time.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
The box is most likely an Identify Friend Or Foe box. Any encryption of actual data would be handled by the applications sending it.
IFOF boxes are standard on all military vehicles. The shuttle is a military vehicle as defined by the relevant treaties as it has been used to launch military satelites. It would carry an IFOF box in any case as a matter of course since there is a sizable probability it might end up comming down in non-US airspace.
One of the alleged features of IFOF is the ability to identify itself to other 'friendly' airborne objects and avoid an attack. For example a passing stinger missile obtained from Uncle Sam by way of the Taleban.
It is unlikely such a box would have an amazingly complex crypto system. After all you don't want your stinger missile to be doing DH calculations before deciding whether to explode. So there could be some real importance there.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
If you have a box and it performs encryption, then in this day and age the security of future transmissions on this box (oh say, to keep terrorist froming saying "Ok shuttle, now lets fly into the sun") should not be reliant on the security of the box itself! This is the same failed tatic that took out the Germans in World War II and DECSS; its security by obscurity. A combonation of public key cryptography to exchange symetric keys to do quick 3DES should be more than adequate for the lenghth of time that the shuttle mission is over and hence time to choose a new key!
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
Since the loss of Challenger, the shuttle has not carried any commercial payloads. It's all military and other government agencies, so they'd want to use secure comms to get those things set up.
Also, they'd want to be able to restrict who has access to the remote telemetry feeds and possibly even any kind of remote control systems they have. The last thing NASA wants is for a l33t hax0r to deploy the landing gear while still in orbit! Good encrytion will play a large part in this.
I noticed at the time that the news agencies were making a big deal of the toxins and that people shouldn't touch anything. Then a few days later it was followed up by reports of people in hospital, in a very "we told you so" attitude.
The chances are though, while there were some pretty nasty chemicals on board, all they wanted to do was to keep the parts in as good a condition as possible. They will be rebuilding and analysing the parts to get as much information on what happened. Let's face it, the main objective of investigations will be to prevent a similar disaster happening again. Good luck to them, I hope they figure it out.
Ninety percent of what the government marks as secret might have been at the time it was marked but today really isn't. Secrecy has a time element to it that causes it to expire.
For example it does not matter - except from a historical perspective - that we can easily read Caesar's encoded battle commands; the Roman army is not at peril because of our ability to do so.
Things which are secret technology have an even shorter 'secrecy expiration date'. At one time a device with an 8080 in it was absolute leading edge technology, and might have been considered 'top secret' - but today?
Please remember that the shuttle design is more than 20 years old.
The news media is looking to sell itself to the public; so the drama of 'looking for a top secret device' sells better than 'NASA looking for Apple II CP/M card' which is the level of technology that was around 20 years ago.
Thats "IFF", chuckles. And a Stinger missle would not interrogate the shuttle and then swerve to avoid it. Some, but not all, Stinger launchers were equipped with IFF interrogators, but still replied on the operator to use them.
Kinda like a turn signal. Be nice if you used it to avoid an accident, but the vehicle still turns regardless.
Sometimes I think people need to realize that even with all the "straight-talk" and analyzation ther were seven people burned alive that didn't do anything wrong except want to explore the unknown and make strives for science. These seven people were family members, friends, teachers, and of a rare breed of astronaut who had joined the handful before them to enter space. Many have been lost in the name of science and discovery, but to assume that maybe they're lives were lost in vain would be to me one of the worst things ever.
Take a step back, realize what's being said and move on, they're collecting the wreckage because someone or a whole lot of someones are going to be losing their jobs because of this. NASA does everything right, and this was something done wrong. For every scientist in NASA there are thousands at the door ready to take their place and for every astronaut there are thousands ready to take their place. NASA is the home of the eleet and the best of the best, failure or mistakes are not taken lightly.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
> It was bound to happen. It allways takes a week or so before the theories start popping up.
I think we could generate a timeline for the public response to certain kinds of disaster. From 9/11 and the Columbia accident the newscoverage seems to be:
Day one: news anchors all day; admit they know nothing and just keep repeating the same rudimentary facts over and over. A few unfounded rumors will start creeping in as the day progresses.
Day two: the news anchors yield to the talking heads; they don't know anything either, but they pretend they do. Bullshit rules.
Day three or four: the special reports start. A few more trivial facts emerge, but for the most part it's just a slicker package for what we got on day one.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
you can't prosecute someone for opening a box labeled "foward sensor array" but one that says "secret goverment property" is a different story.
Sometimes the simplest answer is the right one.
I tire of all these conspiracy theories. Relax and watch more TV instead.
The last thing NASA wants is for a l33t hax0r to deploy the landing gear while still in orbit! Good encrytion will play a large part in this.
So surely, signing of commands is more important that encryption of commands.
Get your own free personal location tracker
You mean the range safety system? Sorry, well documented.
The NSDs provide the spark to ignite the CDF, which in turn ignites the LSC for shuttle vehicle destruction. The safe and arm device provides mechanical isolation between the NSDs and the CDF before launch and during the SRB separation sequence.
The mechanism is installed in the SRB's and the ET. Once away, there is no destruct capability documented. And why document one, but not another?
It's a conspiracy theory to assume anything negative about the type of encryption being used based on the information in these articles.
Everyone keeps asking about why the government is using top secret hardware to do encryption when they could just be using some standard encryption technique, people are complaining about security through obscurity, etc.
It could just be the storage media that holds their private key.
Anyone who stores their private keys on ThumbDrives or carries SmartCards has this kind of "top secret" hardware.
Keep in mind that lots of military craft crash, I'm sure that the loss of a crypto box is not the end of the world. While it may be a good thing to recover, I don't think it's a giant priority.
Travis
Hmmmm. What if an Apache helicopter fell onto your lawn?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
The real acronym for this is IFF not IFOF. I believe that a Stinger can do an IFF query before launch, but it doesn't make it impossible to fire. Once it's on the way the only thing that can save you is to drop flares or out manuever it.
While it is a crash investigation and it is illegal to withhold what you know, if this top secret piece of decryption hardware fell on your lawn, you legal own it as it is on your property and you have salvaged it.
Uh, no. You are totally wrong. It's either your property or it isn't -- it's irrelevent if something happens to land on your lawn. If I accidently drop my hedging shears over the fence to my neighbor, it doesn't automatically belong to my neighbor.
Also note that it's NOT necessarily legal for you to keep something that you find that someone else lost. It's particularly illegal for you to keep stolen goods (like bank robber drops the bag of money and you grab it).
Also contrary to popular belief, if a package is misdelivered to you, you are NOT entitled to keep it. On the other hand, if someone sends you something without your authorization and then bills you, then generally you are allowed to keep it.
Local details may vary, of course.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Dunno ... shouldn't they rely on an inherently secure system, instead of security through obscurity? If so, the encryption wouldn't be compromised by publicizing the encryption hardware. Maybe they'd have to change the keys in related devices, but that's about it.
Recovering old encryption keys (and one-time pads) are valuable to an adversary who had the foresight to record messages that used them.
IIRC this is how the Venona intercepts were decrypted.
The notion of creating cheaper, safer ways to get into orbit is, of course, a no-brainer. Would you want to create more expensive, dangerous paths to orbit?
If I understand correctly, a few factors made the shuttle look like a good idea when the program was intiated:
In principle, this seems reasonable, as you don't have to throw away the investment made in building the craft. In hindsight, we know that the added complexity and maintenance requirements overwhelmed this advantage, but this wasn't necessarily obvious going into the project. People evidently still believe that the goal is attainable, as proposals for reusable craft are regularly floated.
The cost of the support facilities for the shuttle are amortized over the shuttle launches taking place. At the original proposed launch frequency - on the order of once a week or more, if I recall correctly - the impact on payload cost of paying for the launch and maintenance facilities would have been much lower.
Unfortunately, this required a craft reliable and easily maintained enough to launch on a weekly basis, and enough people willing to pay for shuttle payloads to launch at that frequency.
I've heard allegations that this was originally supposed to be the shuttle's only job. It's a craft that can go just about anywhere in low orbit, match courses with stations or satellites, transfer crew, perform repairs, retrieve malfunctioning satellintes, and so forth. As a cargo vehicle, it's horrible, but in other respects it's a very flexible and potentially useful craft.
Of course, its usefulness assumes that there are enough satellites and space stations to require regular shuttle service.
In the political climate of the time, this was important and could be argued to have enough political effect to make it worthwhile to pursue regardless of other merits.
In short, I think the shuttle falls into the "it seemed like a good idea at the time" category. Assumptions that were made turned out not to hold, and costs turned out to be much higher than expected. Thus, the craft we're now stuck with.
Space travel is about going someplace. Someone needs to pick a destination for NASA.
I'm not sure about this. The goal of the manned space program also involves establishing human presence in space. This goal is best accomplished by building more facilities in the areas we can reach easily and know a lot about, as opposed to sending humans to every object we can find. Exploration is a goal too; however, it's not the only goal, and manned expeditions are arguably less useful for this aspect.
Anything science-related is most efficiently performed by unmanned devices. If we're sending people into space, it's for other reasons than science ("because we think it's cool" is, in my opinion, a valid reason).
And, of course, remember that tthe station is not yet complete. Only the Shuttle can do that job.
What a load of bullshit. About half of it in terms of weight happened to be where it is on the back of a Proton booster. Which russians have been and are launching with a frequency of a flight per month or more to carry commercial satellite payloads. So no problem there whatsoever and actually the Shuttle is the most inefficient and expensive way to continue the expansion of the ISS.
Using the Russian craft effectively limits the station's capabilities. Since the Soyuz is the only way to get the crew off the station in an emergency, that means no more than 3 people can be onboard, which is about one-half the intended crew complement, I believe.
The ISS AFAIK has more then 6 docking ports. While you can dock at most two shuttles to it due to space constraints, you can make a Christmas tree of Soyuz and Progress craft out of it. Which in fact means more crew then with a shuttle.
The cargo-capacity of Progress, only a small fraction of the Shuttle's, is simply insufficient to resupply the station in the long term.
After you do a bang for the buck calculation you suddenly find out that Progress is actually a more efficient means of delivering payload. It is less then the shuttle at a time but it is more the enough as Salut and Mir has proved through the years.
Overall, using shuttle for the ISS is only a matter of politics. What the ISS needs to make itself ecomomically more reasonable is not more shuttle. It is a higher capacity cargo container launched with disposable boosters like the Ariana 5, Proton or if it is something even bigger Energia. After all that is what Energia was designed for - to be a modular booster capable to deliver hundreds of tons into low orbit (it cannot reach stationary).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
You absolutely right. It is always sad to loose our fellow citizens working for government. I wouldn't feel that same way for thousand of dirty animals (that's how you call these people in Africa or Asia?) who die every day (F them)
We American patriots should keep together and as world leaders We will prevail.
Viva la America