February 18, 2024 a missile attack by Houthi militants in Yemen hit a cargo ship Rubymar in the Red Sea. With the crew evacuated, the stricken ship would take weeks to finally sink, becoming a symbol for the security of the global internet in the process. Before it fell, the ship dragged the anchor behind it for an estimated 70 kilometers. The meandering anchor severed three fiber-optic cables across the bottom of the Red Sea that carried about a quarter of all Internet traffic between Europe and Asia. Data transmissions had to be rerouted because systems engineers discovered that the cables had been damaged. So this year, NATO, the North Atlantic Alliance, will begin testing a plan to fix the vulnerability Rubymar‘s diving so vividly depicted.
The world’s submarine fiber optic links carry more than 95 percent of intercontinental Internet communications. These tiny, drawn-out strands of fiberglass stretch some 1.2 million km around the planet, each line having the potential to become its own subtle choke point. Between 500 and 600 cables cross the ocean floor worldwide.
“When they cross the ocean, they’re not buried,” says Tim Stronge, vice president of research at telecommunications consultancy TeleGeography. “They’re sitting right on the seabed, and in the depths of the ocean, in the depths of the sea, they’re about as thick,”—he circles his fingers—“less than a garden hose. They are fragile.”
NATO’s HEIST project is now investigating ways to protect member nations’ undersea internet lines, including these 22 Atlantic cable routes, by quickly detecting cable damage and relaying data to satellites. Telegeography
By some estimates, submarine fiber optic cables are used for more than $10 trillion worth of financial transactions every day, as well as encrypted defense communications and other digital communications. If one sinking ship could accidentally disrupt part of a global data transmission, what might happen in an organized attack by a determined government?
Enter NATO, which has now launched a pilot project to find out how best to protect global internet traffic and redirect it when there is trouble. The project is called HEIST, which stands for Hybrid Space-Based Submarine Architecture for Telecom Infosec. (“Infosec” is short for “information security.”)
The Houthis probably had no idea the damage they would cause by attacking
RubymarBut Western officials say there is substantial evidence that Russia and China have tried to sabotage the undersea cables. At the time this article went to press, two undersea cables in the Baltic Sea – connecting Sweden to Lithuania and Finland to Germany – were cut on suspicion of Chinese merchant ships in the region. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius went so far as to call the outages “sabotage”.
“What we’re talking about now is critical infrastructure in society.” —Henric Johnson, Vice Chancellor, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden
This year and next year, HEIST organizers say they hope to achieve at least two goals: First, to ensure that if cables are damaged, operators quickly know their exact location to mitigate the disruption. Second, the project aims to expand the number of paths that data can travel. In particular, HEIST will investigate ways to divert high-priority traffic to satellites in orbit.
“The name of the game when it comes to enabling resilient communications is path diversity,” says Gregory Falco, NATO director of HEIST and assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University. Ensuring the diversity of Internet paths, he said, should include “something in the sky rather than (just) what’s at the bottom of the sea.”
Safe testing
In 2025, HEIST organizers plan to start testing at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) in Karlskrona on the south coast of Sweden. There, they will experiment with smart systems that they hope will allow engineers to quickly locate breaks in an undersea cable to within 1 meter. The researchers will also work on protocols that quickly route data transmissions to available satellites, at least on an experimental scale. And Falco says it will try to sort out the thickness of overlapping rules for the use of undersea cables because there is no one entity that oversees them. Researchers from Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and other countries are involved.
“What we’re talking about now is critical infrastructure
in society,” says Henric Johnson, Vice-Chancellor of BTH and coordinator of the HEIST testing attempt. Its location on the Baltic Sea coast is important: It is a vital waterway for both NATO countries and the Russians. “We’ve had incidents of cables being sabotaged between Sweden, Estonia and Finland,” says Johnson. “So these incidents are a reality for us.
TeleGeography’s Stronge says that even without any deliberate sabotage, there are about 100 cable breaks a year, most of which are repaired by specialist ships on standby in ports around the world. A single repair can take days or weeks and cost several million US dollars. But until now, telecom operators – and many countries – have had little choice.
“Think about Iceland,” says Nicolò Boschetti, a Cornell PhD student working on HEIST. “Iceland has a lot of financial services, a lot of cloud computing and is connected to Europe and North America by four cables. If these four cables are destroyed or compromised, Iceland will be completely isolated from the world.
Satellite links can bypass damaged cables, but perhaps the biggest limitation to satellite backups is their bandwidth. The amount of data that can be transferred to orbit is an order of magnitude smaller than what fiber optics can currently handle. Google says some of its newer fiber links can handle 340 terabits per second; most cables transmit less, but still dramatically exceed the 5 gigabits per second that NASA says can be sent via satellite at Ku-band (12-18 gigahertz), a widely used microwave frequency.
“(Submarine cables) are not buried when they cross the ocean. It sits right on the seabed and in the depths of the ocean, in the depths of the deep sea. …they are fragile.” —Tim Stronge, Vice President of Research, TeleGeography
The HEIST team plans to work on this in part by using higher bandwidth laser optics systems to communicate with satellites. NASA has long been working on optical communications, most recently with an experiment carried out aboard its Psyche asteroid mission. Starlink has equipped its latest satellites with infrared lasers for intersatellite communications, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper officials said the company plans to use laser communications as well. NASA says that satellite lasers can transmit at least 40 times more data than radio transmissions — still far short of cable capacity, but a significant advance.
Laser transmissions still have their limitations. They are easily blocked by clouds, haze or smoke, for example. They must be aimed precisely. Delayed signals (also known as latency) are also a problem, especially with satellites in higher orbits. The HEIST team says it will test new ways to increase bandwidth and reduce signal latency — for example, by aggregating available radio frequencies and prioritizing what data is sent in the event of problems. “So there are ways around it,” says Cornell’s Falco, “but none of them are silver bullets.”
Falco says the key to finding good answers is the open-source process at HEIST. “We’re going to make it super public and we’re going to want people to poke a lot of holes in it,” he says. Give and take and repeated reinvention will be essential for the next phase of the project, he says. “We will enable this capability,” he says, “faster than anyone would believe.”
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