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Why is traffic from Voyager even encrypted? The results back are public scientific data anyway, right? And it's not like other nations (the only ones with power to transmit that far, back then) would send rogue commands without getting caught.
At a previous job, we had a customer who suddenly couldn’t send us email anymore. When their IT sent us the server logs to “prove” it’s our fault, we saw that the one letter in the cached MX record was wrong. This was puzzling, until I looked at the ASCII table to verify that the difference was exactly one bit.
We never found out where in the name resolution process the bit got flipped. The problem healed itself a few days later when the DNS cache expired, so it wasn’t worth further investigation.
That really gave me pause how often random bits are wrong in other data.
Why is traffic from Voyager even encrypted? The results back are public scientific data anyway, right? And it's not like other nations (the only ones with power to transmit that far, back then) would send rogue commands without getting caught.
Bit flips are scary even on Earth. At a previous job, we had a customer who suddenly couldn’t send us email anymore. When their IT sent us the server logs to “prove” it’s our fault, we saw that the one letter in the cached MX record was wrong. This was puzzling, until I looked at the ASCII table to verify that the difference was exactly one bit. We never found out where in the name resolution process the bit got flip…
Besides hardware mitigations (radiation hardening, ECC memory) what would be software mitigation techniques for this?
Why is traffic from Voyager even encrypted? The results back are public scientific data anyway, right? And it's not like other nations (the only ones with power to transmit that far, back then) would send rogue commands without getting caught.
This is what worries me about the current push that all backups including the off site tape vault must be encrypted at rest. Any problem with the de-encryption and your data is toast.
That's pretty fascinating. I admit I find it kind of strange that only the encryption key was affected in this way, i.e. that finding the newly-correct key proved a fix to the issues, as opposed to fixing one issue out of many linked to such an event. It made me wonder--what are the odds of that? What is the relative exposure area of the encryption key compared to the rest of the onboard assets which could have been…