New Hybrid System Aims to Revolutionize Space Internet Infrastructure

Unresponsive computers. Stranded travelers. Shuttered stores.

The CrowdStrike software crash on July 19 demonstrated, on a global scale, just how tenuous IT infrastructure can be – and why backup systems are absolutely critical for maintaining continuous worldwide communication.

A new NATO-funded effort led by Greg Falco ’10, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in Cornell Engineering, seeks to make the internet less vulnerable to such disruptions by rerouting its flow of information to space in the event that the underwater cables that transmit the world’s communications are attacked or accidentally severed.

The project officially launched July 31 with a symposium in Upson Hall that featured representatives from an international consortium of universities, telecommunications companies and governments, all of whom recognized the urgent need for a more resilient internet infrastructure.

“Ninety-five percent of all communications flow through subsea fiberoptic cables. If those go down, we’re done as an IT society,” Falco said. “What we want to do, ultimately, is create a new backbone for the internet and redesign how it flows. And we can do that by creating this hybrid submarine cable network and satellite communication network that works together seamlessly in order to relay data to the relevant parties.”

There are currently hundreds of subsea cables that carry internet traffic around the Earth. Some of the cables are owned by countries; some are owned by companies such as Google and Verizon. Creating a hybrid network, therefore, requires engagement from a wide swath of stakeholders.

The new consortium – called Hybrid Space/Submarine Architecture Ensuring Infosec of Telecommunications, or HEIST – includes researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Bifröst University in Iceland, ETH Zürich in Switzerland, Swedish Defence University, Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, the Royal Swedish Navy, the Icelandic government, U.S. satellite firm Viasat Inc., space tech company Sierra Space Corp. and Icelandic cybersecurity company Syndis.

“Cornell is a hub where a lot of this is going to happen as a center point of the conversation,” Falco said.

The project was seeded with a grant from NATO’s Science for Peace and Security program, with in-kind support from NATO members and partner institutions that brings the total budget to roughly $2.5 million. There are five principle investigators across the different universities, with Falco serving as project lead and NATO country project director.

Given the ambitious scale of what is, in effect, rebuilding the internet, HEIST is a hydra-headed effort, with three primary components:

• A team at Swedish Defence University is developing ultra-precise submarine surveillance mechanisms that can detect potential threats to subsea cables within a meter range.
• The Johns Hopkins researchers are studying how different datacenters can reroute communications traffic if a threat or disturbance is detected, while Falco’s group in the Aerospace Adversary Lab is evaluating ways to relay the high-bandwidth communications via satellite.
• A third team is reviewing the complicated legal and jurisdictional issues that arise when managing international data transfer in telecommunication lines.

“We are assembling pieces of the puzzle and trying to create this massive new ecosystem,” Falco said. “I’d say this is 100% a systems engineering problem, meaning that none of the tech that we’re going to build or assemble hasn’t already in some form been conceived in other applications. This is about fitting all the pieces together. From an engineering perspective, it’s hard, but then also you have the regulatory and political and economic nature of this, which is also hard.”

The goal is to create a functional prototype of the system in two years that will be demonstrated at Blekinge Institute of Technology, a proposed future NATO Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) Maritime Research Center in Sweden. If successful, satellite companies have expressed interest in taking over the infrastructure and scaling it up.

“We’ve all signed this open-source IP agreement on whatever we build and that’s going to be handed off to those partner companies,” Falco said. “We expect the speed of deployment will be a function of the market incentives provided by the users of this end system. All these satellite providers are going to want to take this technology and make a big market out of it because they see this as an opportunity to become the backbone of the future internet.”