Does anyone understand the security concerns here? The satellites can still be tracked and intercepted even with the feed unplugged so what does this really accomplish?
Navy receives data from the spacecraft, pushes that up into their probably-classified HPC environment, processes it there and then gets the output back into the unclassified world via a cross domain solution[1] of some sort.
High-to-low CDSes in particular are very expensive and complex to deploy and obtain approval to operate, so it makes sense that they’re reluctant to spend a ton of money and resources doing that as part of their modernisation work to support a spacecraft that they plan to decommission anyway.
> to mitigate a significant cybersecurity risk to the their High-Performance Computing environment
This is absolutely a lie. If there was a "significant cybersecurity risk", the data access would be shutdown immediately, and it would stay shutdown until the risk was remediated. Instead, when there was pushback, the shutdown was postponed. That's not how anybody deals with a cybersecurity risk.
Great write up about a somber topic.
Does anyone understand the security concerns here? The satellites can still be tracked and intercepted even with the feed unplugged so what does this really accomplish?
I think the problem is on the dissemination side.
Navy receives data from the spacecraft, pushes that up into their probably-classified HPC environment, processes it there and then gets the output back into the unclassified world via a cross domain solution[1] of some sort.
High-to-low CDSes in particular are very expensive and complex to deploy and obtain approval to operate, so it makes sense that they’re reluctant to spend a ton of money and resources doing that as part of their modernisation work to support a spacecraft that they plan to decommission anyway.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-domain_solution
They're critical so best option is to wreck them.
> to mitigate a significant cybersecurity risk to the their High-Performance Computing environment
This is absolutely a lie. If there was a "significant cybersecurity risk", the data access would be shutdown immediately, and it would stay shutdown until the risk was remediated. Instead, when there was pushback, the shutdown was postponed. That's not how anybody deals with a cybersecurity risk.