EU wants to make undersea internet cables more resilient The European Commission has issued recommendations to up the security and resilience of submarine data cables, but says private finance should fund projects to expand capacity, assisted by governments where necessary. Released alongside a white paper analyzing Europe's digital infrastructure requirements, the recommendations …
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At least two of the current wars are the result of one person/country deciding they want something currently occupied by another country and deciding to do a bit of dick-waving with their armed forces. Many of the rest are because one set of people in a country don't like what the other set of people have done or are doing to them.
Neither of these are particularly easy to resolve peacefully. Putin wasn't going to let anyone say "No" to him in Ukraine and Israel and Palestine have been fighting for 80 years now over owning the same bits of land.
Neither of the Commission documents makes any even high level suggestions about how to actually make undersea cables more resilient. They're essentially administrative and address only the intent. Other than to stress the need for mapping of cables and a generic requirement for testing and repair, they say nothing concrete about resilience. IMHO, repair capability is not the key to resilience. It's ideally the ability to ward off attack without detriment rather than merely an ability to recover after a successful attack. But of course that's all down to definitions, and the Commission is not a technology body but a political one.
Consequently, particularly bearing in mind that undersea cables are laid and maintained by corporates, not national bodies, it's probable that these proposals will drive little material change.
Yes after reading "At a top level, the recommendations identify actions EU member states should take, also including any necessary improvements to the security of seabed cables" I wondered what the recommendations were but don't see anything mentioned and struggle to think of any realistic physical protection that can be done. Maybe they are keeping that secret but I doubt it. Disaster planning and redundancy are I think the only options.
On the security side, the Commission wants EU members to ensure the infrastructure is adequately managed and controlled so as to protect it from external threats, including that of data carried on the cables by collecting any necessary information from the owners or operators.
I'm very dubious about that part. Most of the stuff in the 'suggestions' is already done. So you can't just land a cable without already going through licensing and planning requirements. Cable routes have to be accurately marked on marine charts because if they're not, owners can be liable for damage. Because they are, it increases vulnerability. Only real fix for that is if governments increase surveillace and patroling, but that's expensive and if the costs are passed on to cable operators will only increase costs.
I'm not convinced the EU needs to know anything about the data on cables though and that may just make it less secure if that leaks. That kind of thing is best left to customers to ensure they have adequate diversity, seperation or just understand what protected and unprotected really means. Especially with the wet stuff when restoring a cable might take days or weeks depending on things like weather, availability & proximity of cable ships etc etc.
But that's also an area where the EU might be able to chip in. Once upon a time, the owner/operators of those ships were facing financial problems as they were fairly reliant on income from cable operators. Who kept going bust because customers demanded ever falling bandwidth prices, decreasing O&M revenues etc. Then came the drive for power interconnectors, offshore wind farms and demand increased. But the number of cable laying and maintenance vessels probably hasn't kept up. So they may be working on an offshore wind job when a fibre cable gets cut and increases the time to restore.
They can only express the problem, but no word about the solution. Typical of the EU drones.
The ugly truth about seaborne infrastructure is that it is hard to protect at large scale.
What can be done is to threaten retribution to any offender. "If you blow up my stuff, I will blow up some of your assets".
For that you need COJONES, something the EU is short of since 1945.
Actually, you can play Divide Et Impera with the EU nations and Britain.
Ankara, Moscow and others know this very well.
Data stored in U.S. data centers might not be accessible for a bunch of weeks, if the security situation deteriorates for European companies.
A single submarine can do lots of damage in the Atlantic, before she is detected and neutralized.
It takes a few weeks to repair all damage.
Store all mission-critical data in data centers with landline connections to your company. Do not make your core business dependent on U.S. service providers who can only provide the service from U.S. data centers.
SACEUR has proven to be too weak in the face of the Russian and the Turkish threats to the EU.
For example, SACEUR could not mount a full-scale European Air Defence Exercise when Luftwaffe wanted this to happen. SACEUR should have pulled Spain, Italy, France, Britain, Germany, Poland, Romania and Greece together in a Single Unified Force for at least one week of exercise.
Instead, what we got was a half-baked show with part-time pilots from America and second-rate French participation.
So, we need to take matters in our own hands and set up a EuGenStaff, comprised of the top European officers. Each nation sends one man and the staff then elects a chairman from their group. Voting power in the EuGenStaff is determined by national defence expenditure or a similar metric.
Whenever the Turks, the Russians or anyone else poses a threat, EuGenStaff comes together in order to command all of their forces as a single, unified force.
JUDITH: They've dragged him off! They're going to crucify him!
REG: Right! This calls for immediate discussion!
COMMANDO #1: Yeah.
JUDITH: What?!
COMMANDO #2: Immediate.
COMMANDO #1: Right.
LORETTA: New motion?
REG: Completely new motion, eh, that, ah-- that there be, ah, immediate action--
FRANCIS: Ah, once the vote has been taken.
REG: Well, obviously once the vote's been taken. You can't act another resolution till you've voted on it...
Parallel to the cable routes, pipelines should be a network of listening devices, similar to the SOSUS system. Also, active sensors(similar to the helicopter based active sonar) should be moored and connected along these routes. One sensor for each 3kms or so.
Any intruder could then be immediately "pinged" by the active sonar in order to scare him away.
If that is not good enough, an armed patrol aircraft (e.g. A320 MPA) must be dispatched to scare away the submarine.
All not cheap, but given the economic importance of these cables, it probably is worth it.
I would say that is ONE interesting defense idea worth following up. I wonder if any other EU members have any other practical solutions. As others have said here, it would be a challenging problem to, essentially, case-harden these undersea cables.
I know from my reading last week that Iceland is particularly concerned (read: shitting their pants), as their various servers are in Ireland and are connected by two undersea cables. (I think there maybe a third, but where it is escapes me at the moment). Russian 'research vessels' have been identified 'snooping around'.
We all know how vital the internet is, and know what WE do when our ISP goes down for an hour or two at home. Yes—this is a serious challenge I hope finds an answer.
I would say that is ONE interesting defense idea worth following up. I wonder if any other EU members have any other practical solutions. As others have said here, it would be a challenging problem to, essentially, case-harden these undersea cables.
No real point. Where cables come on-shore, or are considered at higher risk of damage from passing ships, they're already given more protection. So they might be buried with matting on top to protect against anchors being dropped or dragged, bottom trawl nets etc. Cables are marked on charts and ships aren't supposed to anchor or fish in the protection zones, but they do, and cables break. Case hardening would maybe offer a little more protection though in the way that the NordStream pipelines didn't. If someone is really determined to break the cables, they will and about the only thing you could do is better surveillance for ships that might be hanging around the protection zones for no good reason. But for stuff like transatlantic cables, that's 6-7,000km of cable to surveil or partrol, times the number of cables, and they're pretty widely seperated.
And then there's all the other risks. A pet hate was clients wanting kmz files of cable routes in, around or between cities. Call around telcos and ask for those 'because you need diversity' and you build a map of critical national infrastructure that should be better protected. One you have those, you can pretty easily figure out how to isolate cities. That.. isn't a good thing. It's also a genie that's well and truly out of the bottle.
Parallel to the cable routes, pipelines should be a network of listening devices, similar to the SOSUS system. Also, active sensors(similar to the helicopter based active sonar) should be moored and connected along these routes. One sensor for each 3kms or so.
So for 1 typical transatlantic system, that would require around 5,000 sensors, plus power and cabling. Figuring on around 15,000 route-kilometers for a typical dual cable. But there have also been proposals to use old, out of service (or sometimes in-service!) cables for research. All of them have a metallic path for power that might be used to study electromagnetic fields, or for fibre, use custom pulses to try to detect cable movement, vibrations etc. Challenge with those is whether or not the research signals could pass through the 'torpedoes' containing the amp/regen components. I think there are some research projects ongoing doing this, but AFAIK only on segment between repeaters, or replacing existing torpedoes with their research packages. Which also reminds me to poke around and see if any of those have published anything.
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