Discussion Cyber threat to the ISS?

[Wishbone]

One thing struck me as incongruous in the Russian ISS crewmembers' blog: they were discussing the movies sent to the station on DVD, and stated that flash drives were not considered, because inter alia they were a security threat. Come on, is it that difficult to change NoDriveTypeAutoRun a few times in the registry? (And yes, I do know that DVDs don't suffer from radiation exposure)

Apart from that, think we have to view the threat as extremely serious, with Stuxnet and other dark stuff looming in the background. The vulnerable spots are of course the uplink and mission control computers. No, I'm not channelling Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

The uplinks can be jammed or spoofed (if someone breaks the encryption or mission control computers). While officially only the United States has the capability to jam uplinks, how hard is it to hijack a few GEO comms satellites and re-program them? To be honest, I don't know, but it is not unthinkable, somewhere around there is a sat comms company or two with slack security.

As for mission control, the potential for meddling varies greatly.

There is no doubt that the ISS is vulnerable physically: witness the Progress burn incident when the station was dangerously close to resonance. ECLSS and power generation and distribution, RMS and whatnot - the danger to our beloved station exists.

The morale of the story: keep your flash sticks clean and be vigilant!

 

[Urwumpe]

More important: don't mix life-critical computer hardware and entertainment. IMHO, there should be enough mass budget for a tablet PCs for each crew member. Permit also reading checklists on them, and they are even pretty useful... just don't let them connect to anything else on the ISS. Maybe in a recreation/private use network, that is separate from the management network.

 

[Wishbone]

A private use network? Will the crewmembers engage in MMORPGs (or however those things are called) then?

 

[Urwumpe]

A private use network? Will the crewmembers engage in MMORPGs (or however those things are called) then?

I doubt it... but for example for email or getting new movies on their tablet PCs, you wouldn't need to use the same network as for managing the inventory of the various tools and consumables on the ISS.

 

[Artlav]

I was under impression that flight computers on ISS are something like soviet vintage Argon or something equal from USA, and the laptops with Windows we see in videos are in no way connected to them, only being used for email and data storage.

So, unless M$ goes to fund the NASA (on condition of installing WindowsCE on flight computers), there is not going to be a virus/hacker threat to station itself.

How much damage can a loss of uplink do?

 

[Urwumpe]

I was under impression that flight computers on ISS are something like soviet vintage Argon or something equal from USA, and the laptops with Windows we see in videos are in no way connected to them, only being used for email and data storage.

Wrong.

The russian side data handling system is made in Europe and not vintage argon. The US side computers are 386 based. They have all NO user interface themselves.

Both US and Russian side use special Notebooks as user interface, that connect to the highest level computer nodes.

 

[Wishbone]

The laptops are the front-end workstations for the processors and they _are_ connected to the critical stuff. A loss of uplink is less worrisome than insertion of wrong sequences and transmission of viruses/trojans to the ISS.

EDIT: :ninja:'ed by Urwumpe