It’s Thursday, November 17, 2022 in Portland, Oregon and it is sunny and crisp outside, an archetypal autumn morning.
It’s thirteen days since I tested positive for COVID-19, and I’m still feeling tired and foggy-brained. It’s not great, folks.
So! The plan for putting computers in everything continues apace, and now that computers are in lots of things, people are realizing that it would be {cheaper, lighter, more efficient} if instead of having a bunch of different wires connecting things you could just use the same wires to connect everything. Which makes sense! Who likes pulling more wire through and ordering wires? Ugh.
This is how I learned about Time-Triggered Ethernet, which is in some readings “people want to make token ring happen again”, but for those of us who are less able to understand what that means, it means:
So for safety and time-critical TikToks, what you’ve needed before is some sort of separate wiring, which is good, because you don’t want inflight entertainment systems on planes also running on the same network as whatever it is on planes that stops them from crashing or hallucinating that sea level is much lower than it is supposed to be at the airport at which you’re landing1.
It would be much better and cheaper and weigh less if you could just use the one bit of network infrastructure for everything, which is why Time-Triggered Ethernet exists: it’s a way for you to send time-critical messages over your regular ethernet at the same time as your regular best-effort TikToks get sent. Very important, very cost-saving.
Anyway, the short version of this story is that a couple of researchers figured out a way to break Time-Triggered Ethernet2[^arstech] which involves having a bit of hardware (so an Evil Housekeeping3 attack) to listen to what’s going down the wire, and then handwaves send some electromagnetic interference to one of the switches. This is a very long way of saying that it was quite funny when watching NASA’s Artemis I launch livestream4 that one of the delays was due to an ethernet switch.
“like a train in a movie that’s barreling directly towards the camera. If you haven’t yet internalized how the medium works, absolutely terrifying! Run from the theater! If you have internalized it, though, you can sit and watch without even flinching.”
That’s it for today. I am tired and my brain is foggy.
Best,
Dan
Which is absolutely a thing that happened at Washington Dulles International Airport in 1990. ↩
New Ethernet Cyberattack Crunches Critical Systems, Michael Kotzol, IEEE Spectrum, 15 November, 2022 [^arstech] Researchers break security guarantees of TTE networking used in spacecraft, Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 15 November, 2022 ↩
“Evil Maid Attack” [sic], Wikipedia ↩
One of my favorite parts of a rocket launch is the poll, which if you’re into your dramatizations of rocket launches is the part where the launch director asks the various stations whether they are GO or NO GO for launch. Artemis I’s launch poll happens right here. ↩