Cyber/Space: Security in a Post-Quantum World

By Ronald van der Breggen,
Chief Commercial Officer Rivada Space Networks

Quantum computing threatens to render obsolete much of what we thought we knew about cybersecurity.

Security experts differ on exactly how and when quantum computers will be able to pick the locks of existing encryption algorithms, but the risk is too large to ignore. If malevolent actors can bypass all available cryptographic security, all sensitive data that can be accessed is at risk. Not without reason, some observers have predicted this would break the Internet itself: If payment information cannot be securely transmitted, for example, how can anyone trust electronic commerce?

We’re not there yet, but we can hardly afford to wait to see if this electronic disaster arrives. One age-old solution to information security is simply to secure your data physically—in a safe, say. Or on a computer locked in a safe. But while that information is secure, it’s also beyond your own reach, which in many cases is not an acceptable compromise.

Likewise, a computer holding valuable data can be “air gapped”—physically disconnected from the internet or any other network. Notwithstanding some extreme exceptions, the data on an air-gapped computer is safe as long as you can physically secure the device itself. Many people today use an air gapped device to hold their cryptocurrency keys, for example, to keep them safe from phishing or hacking attempts. But as with the items in the safe, data on an air-gapped computer is cut off from the world—for good and ill.

If you wanted to connect that computer to a second device, to back it up or merely share computing resources, you could do that simply enough, provided they are close to each other. And if both are otherwise air-gapped, then your security remains as good as the physical security of both devices.

But say you wanted to back up the first machine in another country, or on another continent. You could physically carry the duplicate to the new location. You could, in theory, run a fiber-optic cable that did nothing but connect the two devices. But that would be both prohibitively expensive and impractical. Or you could connect the devices over the internet. But in the hypothetical post-quantum world, there may be no way to secure the data during that transfer.

That leaves satellites. Unfortunately, the architecture of almost every low-earth orbit constellation deployed or planned today is not a good solution to this problem. Many of them are, by design, a very long round-trip journey for connecting the proverbial “last mile”—the distance from the internet backbone to the home or premises of the user. Data goes up from the user terminal to the nearest satellite, and straight back down to a ground station or teleport. From there it’s sent across fiber either to its final destination or to another ground station, where it is once more bounced off a satellite and down to an end point.

In other words, the satellite connection does nothing to improve security of the overall transmission, as the terrestrial legs provide the same opportunities for interception as with any other form of connectivity.

For a satellite constellation to reduce your attack surface, it would have to be designed to keep your data off the internet entirely—to transport it from end to end in space. A geostationary satellite can do that for roughly half the planet, with diminishing effectiveness at higher latitudes and as you approach its horizons on the east and west. But that has its own costs in terms of latency, throughput and, well, cost. And you still can’t go over the horizon with a single GEO satellite.

With this in mind, Rivada has designed and is building a true orbital network. With satellites moving synchronously in 24 polar orbital planes, the network can pass data from one satellite to another via laser links, allowing customers to transmit data securely from one side of the globe to the other, connecting any two points without ever needing to traverse the public internet or be subject there to interception and decryption. With a user terminal at either end, it’s the closest you can come to connecting two otherwise air-gapped machines across thousands of miles.

This approach to “orbital networking,” as we call it, doesn’t solve all the problems presented by the development of quantum decryption, but by routing traffic on a physically separated network, it provides a layer of defense for any organization that needs to securely share data over long distances. It is, as far as we are aware, a unique capability.

Encryption is to data, what airbags are to cars – if you need them, you’re already too late: The car has crashed, and the data is in the hands of the bad guys. You should wear them, of course, just as you should encrypt your data. But what is much better for the safe arrival of a car, is what we provide for data: A safe road.

Furthermore, our partnership with SpeQtral, to deliver the quantum keys to users on our system to encrypt and decrypt the data on our network, means our constellation is “quantum ready,” and is one of the reasons we consider our constellation “ultra-secure.”