British Military Deploys Skynet

rowleyrw writes "The BBC are reporting, 'The British military is set to take one of its most significant steps into the digital age with the launch of the first Skynet 5 satellite. The spacecraft will deliver secure, high-bandwidth communications for UK and "friendly" forces across the globe.' It's not yet the Skynet of Terminator, but how long before it becomes self aware?"

Skynet is not new

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that this is the launch of Skynet 5. Skynet 1A was launched in 1969. See the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] for more details.

Physical security?

[solevita]

Its technologies have also been designed to resist any interference - attempts to disable or take control of the spacecraft - and any efforts to eavesdrop on sensitive communications.

I guess this is the sort of thing the Chinese were thinking about when they recently destroyed that sat. Information security is all well and good, but useless if it can just be shot down.

Re:Skynet 5? What about the other four?

[flooey]

And why, why, why would you call it Skynet? Seriously?

Probably because the original SkyNet satellite was launched in 1971. So, they probably called it SkyNet because it's building a communications network in the sky :)

Secure...

[The Living Fractal]

Forget the stupid terminator reference to something that's been around a lot longer than the Terminator series. I want to know how long before the 'secure' transmissions are decrypted by some black-hat hackers in North Korea and one time pads become a requirement. Also I hope they've cooked up some excellent misinformation to sift into the normal transmissions.

Anyone care to guess what kind of encryption they'll be using? Something they cooked up for the job or something that's been out a while? I'm not a cryptographer. I am curious though, what kind of digital encryption is out there that's considered unbreakable?

TLF

Re:With a name like Skynet...

[malsdavis]

""Jolly good, ol' chap! Let us name it after a fictional military system that runs off the rails and destroys humanity!"

Uh, the British Skynet system pre-dates the original terminator movie by about 15 years.

Re:Don't these guys watch any sci-fi?

[Homr Zodyssey]

There would still be the Cybermen and the Borgs.

Nerd police here. I'm going to have to ask you to come with me. You obviously don't belong. Any nerd worth his bytes would know that the plural of 'Borg' is 'Borg'. As in "We are Borg. You will be assimilated."

Re:Bandwidth

[HarmlessScenery]

I also worked on Skynet 4 and 5. I'd have to disagree with the comment that the amount of information that is classified is 'ridiculous'. When you're talking about a system that all UK operations will be reliant on, you can't be too careful. In most cases, individual snippets of information might seem 'relatively harmless' in isolation, but combined with other 'relatively harmless' snippets of information can quickly reveal exploitable attack vectors on the system.

As for the available bandwidth within the system - it's actually quite a complicated problem. That was one of the areas I studied. Knowing the power and frequency bands available is not enough to be able to determine a maximum data throughput on each channel.

Different types of communications traffic use up frequency and power resources with different efficiencies. So the maximum data throughput varies - a lot - according to actual real world use. You also lose resources due to intermodulation products - which again vary widely with usage patterns.

So when JacksonG says 'nowhere near as much as you might think' - it's probably less than that too ;)