Pirate Radio: RF UWB SS SDR [was: Gatwick drones]
Probably also coming soon, very high PGs wherein the codes, bandwidth and frequencies quickly hop according to a shared secret between the drone and its controller. This combination is being explored for possible Next Generation military comms.
It is said that this is already in public knowledge and operation within SDR community. Though instead of the conventional "bandwidth and frequencies", all the observer sees on their spectrum is random noise, let's say across entire spectral ranges... from start freq to end freq of entire frequency range of ATSC / WiFi / Cellular / FM / Etc allocation space... more generally, across entire start to end of whatever capability range of the tx / rx hardware in use. And where a pre shared or negotiated key is used to impart or mask data into, and out of, the noise. It's not even that these may have, or be, waveform carriers, as the noise may be spark gaps driven, impulse / transform function generators, etc. And the difficulty in triangulating such noise, ie: how exactly does one lock onto random energy, the galactic radiation problem, from everywhere and nowhere. Post links to your favorite papers on these topics.
On 12/23/18, grarpamp
Probably also coming soon, very high PGs wherein the codes, bandwidth and frequencies quickly hop according to a shared secret between the drone and its controller. This combination is being explored for possible Next Generation military comms.
It is said that this is already in public knowledge and operation within SDR community.
Though instead of the conventional "bandwidth and frequencies", all the observer sees on their spectrum is random noise, let's say across entire spectral ranges... from start freq to end freq of entire frequency range of ATSC / WiFi / Cellular / FM / Etc allocation space... more generally, across entire start to end of whatever capability range of the tx / rx hardware in use. And where a pre shared or negotiated key is used to impart or mask data into, and out of, the noise. It's not even that these may have, or be, waveform carriers, as the noise may be spark gaps driven, impulse / transform function generators, etc.
And the difficulty in triangulating such noise, ie: how exactly does one lock onto random energy, the galactic radiation problem, from everywhere and nowhere.
Post links to your favorite papers on these topics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_and_Data_Relay_Satellite_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacrosse_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Imagery_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-224 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_tele... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_radar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ndr2EYkhA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MViVyocQhVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf53Pg2AkdY Radar Love... ;)
Yes, this does sound like a very interesting, and useful idea. One problem with using "the Internet" for truly anonymous communications is that everybody has an IP address. We may try to hide it, by means of VPN's, or TOR, or both, but such communication is still a bit risky. Have a big-enough opponent, say the NSA or GCHQ, and somebody may trace it.
Imagine a person with a computer on a canonical hill, with an hyper-wideband SDR radio, spreading out over perhaps 100 MHz in bandwidth. (unused UHF station bands? Military frequency allocations?) I'm thinking of a transmitter of 10-100 watts, which when spread over 100 MHz, is not particularly loud.
Conceivably, depending on his transmit footprint, 1 million potential listener-computers can hear his signal, also by SDR. He receives data, presumably through VPN or TOR, etc, by means of a packet which is doubly-encrypted: The operator decrypts by using his private key, revealing a still-encrypted packet that he then transmits by ultra-broadband, using a secret provided by the decrypted packet.. Anyone who can 'hear' his signal, and who knows the encoding secret, can decrypt the data, but it can only be further decrypted by some further key. So, nobody knows who actually was the intended recipient.
This amounts to anonymizing "the last 10 miles", making it essentially impossible to learn who is actually receiving this information.
This process could be reversed, with possibly a different person's setup 'listening' to a similar ultra-wideband signal, with a code provided by an encrypted packet. If the receiver hears something, it could be sent by prearrangement to a VPN or TOR, or perhaps re-transmitted to a different ultra-wideband facility.
It should be possible to 'listen' for a large number of simultaneous transmissions, at one site, since each will be encrypted by a different 'secret' transmission encoding.
It may not be obvious, but it will probably be necessary to charge for these services, even if the providers would want to do so for free. Remember "denial of service attacks"? If this were provided as a fairly well-known service, chances are good that somebody would want to gum up the system with overloaded, useless requests for transmissions or receptions. Charging for this system, at least when the service is heavily occupied, would ensure that users would continue to have access to it, or at least the operator is getting rich, or both.
Jim Bell
On Thursday, January 10, 2019, 7:45:39 PM PST, grarpamp
Probably also coming soon, very high PGs wherein the codes, bandwidth and frequencies quickly hop according to a shared secret between the drone and its controller. This combination is being explored for possible Next Generation military comms.
It is said that this is already in public knowledge and operation within SDR community.
Though instead of the conventional "bandwidth and frequencies", all the observer sees on their spectrum is random noise, let's say across entire spectral ranges... from start freq to end freq of entire frequency range of ATSC / WiFi / Cellular / FM / Etc allocation space... more generally, across entire start to end of whatever capability range of the tx / rx hardware in use. And where a pre shared or negotiated key is used to impart or mask data into, and out of, the noise. It's not even that these may have, or be, waveform carriers, as the noise may be spark gaps driven, impulse / transform function generators, etc.
And the difficulty in triangulating such noise, ie: how exactly does one lock onto random energy, the galactic radiation problem, from everywhere and nowhere.
Post links to your favorite papers on these topics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_and_Data_Relay_Satellite_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacrosse_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Imagery_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-224 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_tele... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_radar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ndr2EYkhA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MViVyocQhVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf53Pg2AkdY Radar Love... ;)
...
Imagine a person with a computer on a canonical hill, with an hyper-wideband SDR radio, spreading out over perhaps 100 MHz in bandwidth. (unused UHF station bands? Military frequency allocations?) I'm thinking of a transmitter of 10-100 watts, which when spread over 100 MHz, is not particularly loud.
the problem with a singular transmitter is still the trivial location determination - you want to make that last hop hard to find. previous discussions have suggested MIMO for beam forming / phased array signal emission that lets you do fancy things, like emulate a moving transmitter. if the transmitter appears to be constantly moving, it's a much harder target :) these systems used to be millions of dollars, and now they are merely thousands. (soon enough only hundreds of $?) https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2016-February/027605.html
Conceivably, depending on his transmit footprint, 1 million potential listener-computers can hear his signal, also by SDR. He receives data, presumably through VPN or TOR, etc, by means of a packet which is doubly-encrypted: The operator decrypts by using his private key, revealing a still-encrypted packet that he then transmits by ultra-broadband, using a secret provided by the decrypted packet.. Anyone who can 'hear' his signal, and who knows the encoding secret, can decrypt the data, but it can only be further decrypted by some further key. So, nobody knows who actually was the intended recipient.
this is getting into canonical zero knowledge protocols, albeit adapted for wireless mesh networks. if you search the literature for "zero knowledge wireless sensor network" you'll find a long tangle of research to devour in this domain...
This amounts to anonymizing "the last 10 miles", making it essentially impossible to learn who is actually receiving this information.
one benefit of actual broadcast receivers is the ability to distribute a large amount of information to all simultaneously. in some protocols this can be a big advantage. Tor directory information for example, could be broadcast over digital video bands and then partitioning attacks against directory obviated. bitcoin had discussed doing this for blockchain distribution in Norway, IIRC. best regards,
On 1/12/19, jim bell
"denial of service attacks"?
The concept is that the RF as roughly described in whatever paper cannot be jammed or DOS'd... your RF would appear as noise to all but those holding the RF spectrum noise key, so the only way to jam it, if you even knew it was in use in the first place (say by noting an overall spectrum power bump) would be to raise the noise floor by emitting... you guessed it, random noise... which would wipe out the S/N dB's you need for your own comms be they traditional AM / FM / etc, or this keyed noise tech. So you'd end up in a mutually assured destruction, essentially who can throw more power in the air. You'd probably be able to get more local power up, hop by hop, than a wide area adversary tying to blanket you, so you'd win. You need the RF noise key to cipher the RF, so the underlying data packets are always secure and unaffected by the above. Data would be affected by nodes that are involved in the data layer, before it gets pushed up to or down from RF. That's a trusted evil maid problem and thus out of scope.
Maybe I wasn't clear what I meant by saying "denial of service attack". I wasn't referring to jamming the airwaves themselves: Attempting to do that would be extremely difficult, and essentially impossible, as you understand below.
Here is what I meant: Suppose it became common knowledge that a (free) service existed, call it a variant on a Dark Market. Anyone could send data to the specific Dark Market page, and that data would then be transmitted, with a specified spectrum spreading code. That system would transmit that data, with that spreading code, for concreteness let's say over Manhattan. I am supposing that the transmitting capacity would be limited to, say, 1 million bits per second.
What would happen if a malicious actor sent huge amounts of data, far in excess of 1 million bits per second, to this service for transmission? If the service was free, he could easily do that. He could clog up the transmission system quite easily. The service would still operate, kinda sorta, but it would still be unusable to the average potential customer, because it would always be 'full'. Transmission delays could be enormous.
How to avoid this? One solution would be to charge for such transmissions. A charge as little as 1 cent per one million bits would earn the operator of the system $36.00 for each hour of operation. If said malicious operator did indeed clog up that system, it would cost him $36 per hour to do so. But, that level of earnings would then motivate other people to set up similar systems.
However, I think a better system would be a bidding-type arrangement. If usage was low, the bid would be very low, essential zero cost. Only if the usage was high, say over 3/4 of the capacity of the system, would "bidding" resolve whose data gets transmitted. If there was indeed a denial-of-service attack going on, raising usage close to 100% of capacity, the price could go way up, making a lot of money for the operator of the system.
Jim Bell
On Sunday, January 13, 2019, 12:40:08 AM PST, grarpamp
"denial of service attacks"?
The concept is that the RF as roughly described in whatever paper cannot be jammed or DOS'd... your RF would appear as noise to all but those holding the RF spectrum noise key, so the only way to jam it, if you even knew it was in use in the first place (say by noting an overall spectrum power bump) would be to raise the noise floor by emitting... you guessed it, random noise... which would wipe out the S/N dB's you need for your own comms be they traditional AM / FM / etc, or this keyed noise tech. So you'd end up in a mutually assured destruction, essentially who can throw more power in the air. You'd probably be able to get more local power up, hop by hop, than a wide area adversary tying to blanket you, so you'd win. You need the RF noise key to cipher the RF, so the underlying data packets are always secure and unaffected by the above. Data would be affected by nodes that are involved in the data layer, before it gets pushed up to or down from RF. That's a trusted evil maid problem and thus out of scope.
participants (3)
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coderman -
grarpamp -
jim bell