SPEED OF LIFE: SECURING AND SCALING DEEP SPACE NETWORKS

HALLO SPACEBOY

I’ve always been fascinated by the universe - the scale, the complexity, the beauty, the unknown is simply humbling.?There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on Earth so, simply by the laws of probability, life is a common occurrence, with life on Earth a mere flash-in-the-pan footnote circling an insignificant star.?The Fermi Paradox was surmised in 1950 and yet over 70 years on, despite the SETI and METI programmes, we are still ‘alone’. There’s no doubt humanity has come a long way, but our perception is limited, with our only context being other life on Earth and our appreciation of time so selfishly absolute.

?

Building on his work on Special Relativity, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity demonstrated gravitational time dilation which is essentially the effect gravity has on time.?On the surface of Earth this is imperceptible, but over the expanse of space it becomes tangible.?The laws of physics are constant, they existed before humanity and will outlive us as a species. It is these laws, for example the electromagnetic spectrum and the speed of light, that we use in our attempts to communicate beyond our immediate solar system.?Other civilisations may have tried to reach beyond their star system but may have become extinct before the signals ever reach another lifeform.?The challenge is compounded by the incomprehensible vastness of space and the transit of light across this expanse - the observable universe is around 93 billion light years across so a world 65 million light years away (a short stroll in universe terms) looking at Earth through a telescope today would see dinosaurs, 4.54 billion light-years and Earth wouldn’t even exist.?There are theories that one day we could exceed the speed of light (superluminal motion), but these will likely remain theories for the foreseeable future as they would essentially invoke time travel.?The other potential solution lies in quantum entanglement but, although proven in a lab, I don’t think it’s anywhere near the mainstream.

Anyway... my day job isn’t amateur philosopher, scientist, and stargazer - I work with businesses from all over the world helping them to realise their transformation to zero trust.?These conversations invariably have reference points embedded in networking which means I’m often in discussions around the impact on operations of latency, bandwidth and backhauling traffic.?There’s no doubt these are real-world challenges today, but they are very Terran compared to the ~22 hours NASA’s Deep Space Network takes to send a message to Voyager 1, around 21 light hours away, ~14 minutes to Mars, ~43 to Jupiter or 1,461 days to the nearest star.?Interplanetary communication is a niche use case today and is expertly handled by various space agencies around the world, but it’s unlikely to stay that way - in the last few months commercial flights of space tourists have blasted into orbit and the cadence will increase.?The optimist in me hopes that by making space accessible, humanity will pause to contemplate that we are merely energy made in the core of dying stars moving through time.?Perhaps then instantaneous communication might not seem so important after all.?Unlikely, I know…

?

With Musk, Besos and Branson pushing the commercialisation of space we’re perhaps at the cusp of an era of exploration and expansion that will move us beyond niche communication of telemetry or scientific data by space agencies to us needing the type of scalable, secure connectivity we enjoy on Earth extended into space.?You’ve got to wonder whether the mechanisms we’ve developed on Earth which we complain about today are going to look like the good old days as we start to colonise our solar system.

?

One of the reasons humanity has prospered is our adaptability, and I’m sure we’ll adapt.?Space communication has evolved from the sublime Lovell telescope a few miles from where I’m writing this at Jodrell Bank using radio-waves to track Sputnik 1 and the moon landings, to several globally distributed Deep Space Networks communicating with the deep space probes we’ve sent into the darkness.?These technologies however still utilise radio-waves and to succeed we need to build upon the foundations established by space agencies to develop new protocols that can cope with distance, interference, latency, and the insatiable demand for bandwidth as we scale.?

?

These aren’t trivial problems and require pragmatism and prioritisation.?Until we figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light, we aren’t getting out of this solar system in anyone’s lifetime, so the problem of interstellar communication isn’t likely to be an immediate challenge.?Indeed, humanity may well be extinct, either through our own means or exterminated by a more advanced civilisation before it ever becomes an issue.?However, mass interplanetary and near-space travel are realistic goals in the next few hundred years, so how are we going to secure and scale to meet the communication needs of this?

?

On Earth today we are approaching 5 billion internet users and have seen IP traffic skyrocket (no pun intended) as a result.?People are addicted and aren’t going to give this up just because we leave the planet.?If anything, they’re going to expect at least parity in bandwidth, security, and ubiquity... and will expect it to be interplanetary.?Users aside, we’ll absolutely need to expand system to system communication across these distances as well as we sync context, data, and identity.

The paradigm shift on Earth is towards zero trust for users and services because it displaces some of the entrenched security architectures that expose an attack surface and allow lateral movement.?The concepts of least privileged access have been around for nearly 50 years, but it was always hard to achieve, involved too much compromise or simply wasn’t technically achievable.?That’s changed - the technology to enable zero trust combined with drivers such as public cloud, SaaS and hybrid working now make it the logical conclusion.?The entwining of identity with network agnostic, software-based zero trust technologies creates defence-in-depth security abstracted from the controls and bottlenecks that create compromise and limit scalability in legacy architectures.

?

This abstraction allows scalability and a more dynamic approach to connectivity and security.?These elements coalesce to meet the challenges companies face in transforming to meet the needs of their customers and partners who all increasingly exist on the terrestrial internet.?If we combine this with technologies that are becoming established such as public and private spectrum 5G we have a powerful, repeatable, and secure foundation from which to scale on this planet.?The next challenge must be to consider if these new architectures can extend on an interplanetary or interstellar level.

?

GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM

?

I appreciate that I raise more questions than potential answers and don’t claim to be a scientist so, if you’ve made it this far, then I’d welcome discussion on my thoughts.?In terms of the immediate challenges there are technologies that exist today that will help us progress.

?

Delivering connectivity with enough bandwidth and tolerable latency will be an immediate challenge.?It’s impractical to run cables into space and dishes, satellites and relay-stations are expensive infrastructure generally owned by governments rather than private enterprises.?In recent years I’ve espoused the message of removing bottlenecks on internet breakouts, but as there are currently limited ways to get traffic off planet these will need to be diversified.?There’s an interesting option here in 5G - it would provide the capacity and latency needed and has public and private elements.?However, it does have relatively limited range so we’d need to consider how it could be easily extended into orbit and perhaps further.?Add to this that 5G is available today, 6G is already being developed and will erode the already low latency of 5G even further.?By the time we can colonise outer space we will be multiple generations ahead of this, improving bandwidth, latency and hopefully range, with the theoretical arbiter of this ultimately being the speed of light.

?

Fortunately, NASA is testing laser communications to cope with increased demands for bandwidth.?Their Laser Communication Relay (LCRD) is over 40 times faster than radio-based technologies, can travel 10 times further and can be encrypted.?It is, however, susceptible to the weather so getting the signal from space to a planet's surface could be problematic.

?

We also need to finally move properly to IPv6.?IPv4 isn’t even enough for this planet but IPv6 can accommodate even the wildest growth needs of the human race.

?

Our models of security, monitoring and automation need to be considered.?Imagine if an automated mine on an asteroid millions of miles away from Earth or a satellite with a mini nuclear reactor was hacked and used for malevolence… there’s no out-of-band backup connectivity and it could be a long time before you can get an engineer there to fix it. ?Do our current methods of certificates, encryption, tunnels, and monitoring protocols meet the requirements when traffic could take hours or days to make a round-trip??With the latency involved you may not even get the telemetry that something has been compromised before it’s too late.?How can this be automated, self-healing and intelligent all operating with the unavoidable latency and jitter over space?

?

Although it may seem we are increasingly pursuing software-based architectures there still needs to be some physical infrastructure underpinning it all.?What will be needed to deliver these new networks and security models? The spacecraft we build today destined for other parts of our solar system take so long to build and test that the technology in them can seem truly archaic by the time they launch.?Connectivity is just one part of the equation. We will need AI, self-healing components, compute, hosting, redundant power, and climate control all in industrial, radiation shielded casings and we will need them in quantities we simply can’t produce today at a price point that is commoditised.

?

Therefore, in working with the technologies at our disposal today what will space IT infrastructure look like??Are we going to build connected datacentres in space or on other planets or try to extend out from Earth??How will we automate and stretch context, posture, and identity over this vastness? Today we talk of services being ‘cloud native’ and ‘globally distributed’ but these will need to become Solar System native and perhaps ultimately Universe native.?Infrastructure is only part of the equation.?How are we going to monitor, troubleshoot and log when some of this won’t be real-time??Are current protocols up to the task??How will tunnels cope with stickiness, how will protocols cope with jitter and latency potentially over years? Can our current programming languages accommodate these challenges??How are we going to align user expectations with the fact that some (most) things won’t be real-time?

?

There are no doubt many, many more challenges, all of which will require both technological and mindset shift.?Considering the evolution of human communication from verbal, to handwritten letters, to telephony, to radio, to email, to IM we may have to readjust our expectations as we venture into space.?For example, I work for a US company but live in the UK and have colleagues all over the world.?I don’t expect my international colleagues to answer my IMs or email instantly and I’m OK with that - I understand it and adjust to it.?The same is going to have to be true for interplanetary communications, first it will seem inconvenient and then we’ll just adapt to it.?That’s fine for people, but systems will need to adapt as well.?The growth of edge compute will allow security and policy enforcement to be distributed, which in turn will reduce the footprint and reliance on datacentres and, of course, the associated backhauling of traffic.?There can be localised pockets of services on a planet with the ability to store and send for interplanetary comms.?

?

I’m excited to be around as we start to realise this journey as a species and, even though I might not get off this rock in my lifetime, I would hope my work can contribute to it in some way - Zscaler born in the cloud… made in the universe!?What is clear is that extrapolating traditional approaches to networking and security can’t meet these challenges, and we need to look ahead to ensure that events don’t overtake us.?Perhaps I’m being too optimistic - we can’t even make IPv6 ubiquitous yet, but if we didn’t dare to dream then we’d have never got to space in the first place.

?

So, what are we waiting for? ?As the late, great Bill Hicks said, “we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace”.

?