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Pawn - Q7 ... Checkmate?

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Re: Pawn - Q7 ... Checkmate?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Jan 09, 2022 9:20 am

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cthia wrote: :idea: I never considered that. So, essentially you are saying that a Spider can sneak up on a skunk and steal his stink AND his command codes?


No, I am not saying that. In order to properly hack, you need to transmit, which reveals your position. That's also the reason why hacking can't be done with recon drones either.

If you are within PDLC range, you get exactly one round-trip in a recon drone before the clusters engage you. The PDLC engagement time is probably measured in the two-digit millisecond time, if not less, so you'd need to be within 15000 km to send and receive more than one round-trip.

Above that, if you go out of PDLC range, you're still within laser and graser range, up to 1 million km. Let's say the engagement time is 2 seconds from receipt of the transmission. If the RD is positioned 1 light-second away and let's say that's outside PDLC engagement range, then you get two round-trips before the lasers and grasers find you. At this range, this is also lethal to a spider-drive ship and the only saving grace for an LD is its massive armour. But as soon as it's hit once, its stealth is compromised.

Beyond light-speed weapons, we have CMs and regular missiles. Let's say the engagement range for a CM is up to 2.5 million km and it accelerates at 200,000 gravities. That gives an RD sitting at 1 million km away 3 round-trips and change. Above 2.5 million km (over 8 light-seconds), the engagement is done with shipkiller missiles and that's also a 3-round-trip hacking exchange. Going further away from those numbers doesn't help because the missiles are accelerating, so doubling the distance only increases the interception time by the square root of 2, meaning you get fewer round-trips.

So the only way I could see an active hacking attempt work would be with a swarm of networked recon drones, with each one picking up where the previous one left off. Then you get as many round-trips as there are drones, assuming they're within energy range (if they're outside, the round-trip is 6.66 seconds, so humans have time to intervene). I frankly don't see this as worthwhile, unless you already know there's vital information you need.

Instead, those RDs can be better used in passive hacking. Gather as much information as possible from EM transmissions that leaked through, such as obtaining current cipher codes and encrypted commands, finding out which ships are tac net nodes, etc.
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Re: Pawn - Q7 ... Checkmate?
Post by kzt   » Sun Jan 09, 2022 12:50 pm

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Honestly, it depends.

You need to know there is some sort of vulnerability if you have any hope of doing something in the rather limited time between when you pop out and start transmitting and when you get vaporized. There is no time for subtle tricks. It all has to be scripted and ready to go.

So, if you know there is a vulnerability and how to exploit it, there really isn't any reason you can't have a RD launch the script automatically rather then wanting to get a person in there.

You'd be doing something like sending a data stream that is looked at by their Electronic Support Measures (ESM) system. It includes a pattern that causes the ESM system to start processing the data instead of just looking at it, smiliar to the trick used on some AV system. This allows you to take over the ESM system, which is a trusted part of the combat system. And then you can do things like flip the state of all friendly and hostile vessels.
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Re: Pawn - Q7 ... Checkmate?
Post by cthia   » Sun Jan 09, 2022 1:17 pm

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kzt wrote:
cthia wrote:That is the tactic used by the Japanese in Vietnam. The enemy was hidden underground. Hence, in several cases the Marines had advanced too far without knowing it.

"Was it over when the Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor?"

But yeah, probably what you are thinking.

OMG! If anyone says I posted this, I will deny it you hear?! I didn't even get the right branch of the military either. Anyway, my apologies for flubbing history.

No excuses for this one, except that I have been binging on a lot of war movies and documentaries lately. A lot! And the details are beginning to run together.

At any rate, I meant to reference the plot of the movie We Were Soldiers, when in 1965, a US Army officer leads 450 Soldiers into the la Drang valley, where an ambush of 2000 well-armed Vietnamese troops awaits them. A good movie.

Thanks for being kind, kzt, when you must have thought I was a Looney. LOL

Anyway, I am in the middle of the docuseries WWII in Color: Road to Victory. Ten episodes. Information overload.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Pawn - Q7 ... Checkmate?
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Wed Jan 12, 2022 12:22 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's exactly the point: the Masadans wouldn't share the codes, even if they knew that sharing the codes with their friendlies is a good idea. That means that no one but the ship that launched them would know what the codes are.


Sharing them with friendlies would require designating the other ships as friendly--something the Masadans would not have done.

I also assume that setting the codes on missiles is an automatic thing... you don't want to forget it during an engagement and leave the default code as "admin" / "admin". In a regular fleet action, when the ships are tied into a tactical net, the sharing of the codes is probably automatic too, the same way that they direct which ship's CMs are targetting which region of oncoming missiles and which ship's shipkillers are directed at a specific sensor target. Once MNS Principality was captured, there was no tac net for MNS Thunder of God to share its codes with.


Exactly. If you share tactical data with a ship you share the codes also. Everything's automatic, a friendly can destruct missiles, an enemy can't. The command crew certainly know how it works but they don't need to actually do anything.

On the other hand, one of the things I'd have expected the Peeps to do is to build in a backdoor code for themselves, in case the Masadans ever decided to turn those missiles against them. However, I don't expect that Yu or Theisman knew those codes and, even if they had a thumb drive with them, it might not have been possible to use Manty hardware to send. The PN would specifically design something that it would be hard for the RMN to emulate.


They don't need to get fancy--simply compromise the code generator on the Masadan ships. It doesn't matter if the RMN can send the codes or not, the only secret is knowing what was done to the code generator (and that it was done at all.)

(Note that this is a real-world threat vector. Hidden flaws in random number generators can be used to decode secure communications, and why in the old days you couldn't export crypto with too big a key space.)
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Re: Pawn - Q7 ... Checkmate?
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Wed Jan 12, 2022 12:27 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:When they reached energy range, I do expect a furious cyber warfare did ensue. Both sides would be trying to crash the other's tactical network, spoof commands from the controlling ships, identify which ships are tactical nodes to target first and thus collapse the network; and all other types of hacking. If both sides survive and disengage, if you had obtained some knowledge of where the enemy's forces, objectives, etc., you could put that on the win column.

Which is probably why remote hacking is very difficult. Before MDMs, ships did get very close to each other (relatively speaking) and such kind of hacking would be possible.


I don't think hacking is going to be a meaningful factor in battle. Tactical nets will have agreed upon encryption keys before battle starts and nothing that comes in that isn't properly encrypted will be ignored.

There will be a lot of effort to jam enemy communications, though.
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Re: Pawn - Q7 ... Checkmate?
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Wed Jan 12, 2022 1:01 am

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cthia wrote:Do note the two points that I highlighted. I don't think that point one will matter because of the reality of point two. Because of the total stealth of the Spiders, the GA will be deep into enemy territory without knowing it. How do you know you are not already behind enemy lines when you can't see the enemy. That is the tactic used by the Japanese in Vietnam. The enemy was hidden underground. Hence, in several cases the Marines had advanced too far without knowing it.

Heck, at Darius, I suspect that the GA will already be behind enemy lines upon hypering into the system.

The LDs: Didn't anyone tell you. We like stooging around the hyper limit too. We catch a lot of flies that way.


There have been other discussions about the area of the hypersurface--it's simply too big for Darius to guard it in force.
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Re: Pawn - Q7 ... Checkmate?
Post by tlb   » Wed Jan 12, 2022 10:06 am

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Loren Pechtel wrote:Note that this is a real-world threat vector. Hidden flaws in random number generators can be used to decode secure communications, and why in the old days you couldn't export crypto with too big a key space.

Just checking to see if we are on the same page.

It was my understanding that it was illegal to export a a cryto-system with too large a key, because too large a key meant that NSA would not be able to decrypt messages using that system in any reasonable amount of time.

Is that what you are saying, because it sounds like you said that too large a key made it easier to exploit flaws in pseudorandom number generators?
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Re: Pawn - Q7 ... Checkmate?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Jan 12, 2022 7:59 pm

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tlb wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:Note that this is a real-world threat vector. Hidden flaws in random number generators can be used to decode secure communications, and why in the old days you couldn't export crypto with too big a key space.

Just checking to see if we are on the same page.

It was my understanding that it was illegal to export a a cryto-system with too large a key, because too large a key meant that NSA would not be able to decrypt messages using that system in any reasonable amount of time.

Is that what you are saying, because it sounds like you said that too large a key made it easier to exploit flaws in pseudorandom number generators?


He's saying that in the old days, too large keys were not allowed in exports because it would make it too hard for the NSA to crack. That's why the DES was using 56-bit keys back in the 1990s. I think ROT13 is more secure than that...

As for the failure in random number generation, there was a notorious bug in OpenSSL caused by a patch by a Debian developer (and carried over to Ubuntu) who was trying to clean up warnings about uninitialised memory. That caused the entropy in the PRNG to be too low, thus limiting the possible outputs from that PRNG. Calculating all possible keys generated by those versions of OpenSSL was not only doable, it was done and posted.
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Re: Pawn - Q7 ... Checkmate?
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Wed Jan 12, 2022 11:02 pm

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tlb wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:Note that this is a real-world threat vector. Hidden flaws in random number generators can be used to decode secure communications, and why in the old days you couldn't export crypto with too big a key space.

Just checking to see if we are on the same page.

It was my understanding that it was illegal to export a a cryto-system with too large a key, because too large a key meant that NSA would not be able to decrypt messages using that system in any reasonable amount of time.

Is that what you are saying, because it sounds like you said that too large a key made it easier to exploit flaws in pseudorandom number generators?


No--I'm saying a flawed generator produces a small key space and thus exposes the data to attack.
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Re: Pawn - Q7 ... Checkmate?
Post by tlb   » Wed Jan 12, 2022 11:58 pm

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Loren Pechtel wrote:Note that this is a real-world threat vector. Hidden flaws in random number generators can be used to decode secure communications, and why in the old days you couldn't export crypto with too big a key space.

tlb wrote:Just checking to see if we are on the same page.

It was my understanding that it was illegal to export a a cryto-system with too large a key, because too large a key meant that NSA would not be able to decrypt messages using that system in any reasonable amount of time.

Is that what you are saying, because it sounds like you said that too large a key made it easier to exploit flaws in pseudorandom number generators?

Loren Pechtel wrote:No--I'm saying a flawed generator produces a small key space and thus exposes the data to attack.

While I agree that a flawed random number generator is bad, you were saying "in the old days you couldn't export crypto with too big a key space". That is not the same thing as "a small key space", which would only prevent you from exporting if the customers complained or refused to buy your code. The legal impediment was against exporting a generator and encryption system with a large key space (which made it difficult to decrypt), not one with a small key space that was relatively easy to decrypt.
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