In early February 2024, a missile hit the Rubymar ship in the Red Sea. The damaged ship sank for weeks, dragging an anchor 70 km behind it that severed three internet cables that carried a quarter of internet traffic between Europe and Asia. It took months to repair the cables. Now, as part of the HEIST project, NATO has begun testing a system for redirecting traffic through near-Earth space, IEEE Spectrum reports.
Submarine fiber optic communications account for more than 95% of intercontinental Internet traffic. The total length of 500-500 cables laid along the bottom is 1.2 million km. According to some estimates, fiber-optic networks enable financial transactions of more than $10 trillion every day. The cables themselves are deep, they are quite thin and, in fact, do not have any protection at depth. If significant damage can be caused by damage to one or more cables, then a real disaster for owners and users can occur if the attack occurs at the national level.
Image source: HEIST
Therefore, NATO launched the HEIST (hybrid space-submarine architecture ensuring infosec of telecommunications) pilot project. HEIST should help to quickly determine the exact location of the damaged cable section. In addition, the project is aimed at creating “workarounds” for data transmission in the event of a break. Among other things, provision is made for the transmission of information via satellites in orbit.
In 2025, it is planned to begin testing on the southern coast of Sweden – intelligent systems may make it possible to determine the location of ruptures with an accuracy of up to a meter. In addition, work will be carried out on protocols for quickly redirecting data to available satellites. Experts will also understand the rules for using submarine cables – there is currently no single body that controls their work. Researchers from Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland, the USA and other countries took part in the project.
Image source: Submarine Cable Map
TeleGeography reminds that without any sabotage, about 100 cable breaks occur annually. Most of them are eliminated by specially equipped vessels. Very expensive repairs can take several days, weeks or months. In some cases, we can even talk about years. Until now, telecom operators and even some countries had no alternatives in case of a break. For example, Iceland, on whose data center many financial services operate and a lot of cloud computing is performed, is connected to Europe and North America by only four cables.
Satellites can help transmit data, but the main limitation is their low throughput, which is orders of magnitude less than that of fiber optics – units of Gbit/s versus tens or hundreds of Tbit/s. HEIST involves the development of satellite communications, including the use of lasers for communications. NASA, Starlink and Amazon are working on similar projects. NASA is confident that lasers will be able to speed up transmission by at least 40 times.
However, this is still far from the throughput of cables, and lasers have a number of technical limitations that prevent widespread use. Increasing throughput and reducing latency is what HEIST will be working on, although none of the methods is a panacea yet. It is stated that all HEIST work will be as public as possible – people will be able to actively discuss and criticize ideas, and contribute to its rapid development.