61–70 of 93 posts
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Considering how much progress that has been made in encrypting internet traffic radio seems painfully slow in evolving to be more secure. Edit: specifically radio protocols not carrying internet traffic
> Considering how much progress that has been made in encrypting internet traffic radio seems painfully slow in evolving to be more secure. An important reason that I see is because (at least in Germany, I guess worldwide) ham radio operators are not allowed to encrypt their traffic. Commercial companies are a lot more conservative concerning encryption than "hacker people".
I guess it's because it would eliminate the possibility of collaboration and also enable using it for commercial purposes without anyone being able to check.
There's an exception for command and control systems like satellite control.
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That’s because there isn’t a point. In order for encryption to work, you need to exchange keys at some point. Doing that half a world away is rather pointless. Doing it over the air, how do I know Alice won’t intercept and broadcast her keys louder than me? Or just interfere and prevent me from sending keys? As we all learned in WWII, a code is better than encryption when you need complex PKI to achieve encryption. I…
I watched some documentary where the US were monitoring enemy communications but didn't know what a specific code word was referring to. If I recall correctly, the US staged a fake transmission that one of their islands had some issue or other... and suddenly they picked up enemy broadcast with the code word in question. So then the US knew what the code word referred to.
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Which is especially funny, because their communications were encrypted after they encoded them into Navajo.
"Encrypted" is too strong a word. But the code talkers needed a way to represent English that didn't have a natural Navajo equivalent. So they developed a vocabulary of 411 Navajo words to stand for common military terms. E.g., BESH-LO, which is Navajo for "iron fish", meant "submarine". The vocabulary included a phonetic alphabet to represent the 26 English letters. E.g., the three Navajo words MOASI, TLA-GIN, and B…
However it sounds like they were mainly used in heavy combat conditions where the enemy didn't have recording equipment for later analysis. So in that scenario specifically (but in that alone) it was pretty secure.
If anyone is interested in satellites, check out your options for amateur radio licensing in your country. The ISS has a repeater that even the most basic license holder is able to use. It's using VHF/UHF frequencies, and a low power 5W radio is enough to work it. Occasionally the astronauts will get on the radio as well and chat with you! I haven't been lucky enough to do that yet. But I have heard them talking when…
My father is a radio lover, a DXer, and sometimes nearly contemplated a ham license. So I grew up with him listening to shortwave and other bands, he explained all the concepts, WWV would be on for two hours at a time (you could literally count every minute). Another fixture was the police/fire scanner that would be on most evenings, especially when we heard sirens. Dad put up a nice rotary Yagi VHF/UHF tower for the…
In most of Europe you can listen all you want and talk about it. I think in the US some frequencies were forbidden to listen to and to this day these are blocked on scanners. Not sure why as analog cellphones are long obsolete.
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COSPAS-SARSAT no longer monitors 121.5, for various reasons, so no satellite systems regularly monitor 121.5. This means that 121.5-only ELTs are obsolete, and prohibited for installation by the FAA since 2018. Modern ELTs are COSPAS-SARSAT transponders like EPIRBs and PLBs with only minor aviation-specific features. ATC does still monitor 121.5, but that's with an eye towards voice transmissions, not radio beacon ac…
I had to look this up. Wow! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cospas-Sarsat_... > The International Cospas-Sarsat Programme is a satellite-aided search and rescue (SAR) initiative. It is organized as a treaty-based, nonprofit, intergovernmental, humanitarian cooperative of 45 nations and agencies (see infobox). It is dedicated to detecting and locating emergency locator radio beacons activated by persons,…
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You are ignoring HTTPS allows people half a world awaywo exchange keys with a server and prevents other people follow interfering other than DoS attacks. >As we all learned in WWII, a code is better than encryption when you need complex PKI to achieve encryption I was never in WWII and I'm not sure what you mean by code as typically that's just encryption but less formalized.
Https works because there is a destination address that goes to a physical network card. Over the air, there is no 'routing'. Alice can intercept my transmission, then literally, just use a more powerful radio to 'talk over me' with her keys. Ergo, MITM. I worked with guys in the military who did this for a living... Radio is like being able to packet sniff (and modify) packets from anywhere.
Https (or IP for that matter) does not use the physical card to authenticate. That wouldn't make sense, except for very local networks. And since IP relies on ARP for the physical network addreess, even local IP networks can suffer MITM, by way of ARP spoofing.
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I think there is some confusion here. HTTPS is secure. Even with MITM attacks. This is because the MITM will not have a valid certificate to provide authenticity for the public key returned. The reason why middle boxes in corp networks can MITM is because the the corp owns the device and has installed their own domain trust to the device. This means the MITM can return a cert and public key that your device will trus…
HTTPS is only as secure as the CA that signs the certificate. My point is, at some point you have to bootstrap the trust. That is the single most vulnerable point (and why becoming a trusted CA is quite complex and easy to lose if you mess it up)! Without the CA, HTTPS is insecure (try self-signed certs and you'll see your browser agree with me). If you try and bootstrap a CA over the radio, it is vulnerable to MITM…
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Which is especially funny, because their communications were encrypted after they encoded them into Navajo.
Encryption uses math, code uses a dictionary. These communications were not “encoded” but an actual language.
Basically you are taking a subset of encryption using only substitution and calling that a code.