Host for espionage stallite? Options

[Gorath]

Does anyone have a host and security sheaf for a satellite? I want to have satellite live videofeed.

Gorath

[Backgammon]

Do you mean you want to hack a SPY satellite to check it's video feed?

If so, a colour of OH MY GOD and a rating of JESUS H CHRIST are in order.

[Smiley]

What does the H stand for?

[lollerskates]

hippo.

[Eyeless Blond]

On the other hand, keep in mind that the majority of what's actually in the sky is far, far behind the SOTA (hell, the GPS satelites we use today were put up in, what, the 70s and 80s?). So the spy satelites may have been silly-gee-whiz hot back in their day, but the one you're looking for probably has degraded to maybe an orange or green by now. This is my reasoning for why the satelite constellations in Matrix are (mostly) so damn easy to hack.

[Fortune]

[Shanshu Freeman]

[tisoz]

Our father who art in heaven, Howard be thy name...

[Edward]

I would expect a spy sat to be ether orange or red, probably on the low end of hard, remember so many people hav them that there hardly supper secret.

The thing is however that gaining access is going to be a lot harder than just the ratting, lets say you want to access mitsuhama’s orbital security observation platform, you cant just log on. You have to go into mitsuhamas PLTG, mitsuhama corpreat (as apposed to the public domain hosts that make up there public matrix presence), chokepoint mitsuhama internal security, chokepoint, mitsuhama intelligence, chokepoint, satellite surveillance, constellation you want. Security tally will carry over threw out this trip.

Allowing for the fact that I may be over or under estimating the security on a spy sat network your going to have to hack threw 7-10 hosts including 3-5 rated red average or orange hard with security tally for the entire trip adding up. That is what makes it difficult.

Alternatively there may be a back door somewhere that will let you skip most of that, if you want to use it however you need to know where it is which will likely not be easy to discover (if it was the admin would have remover or hidden it)

Edward

[Jrayjoker]

There are a lot of typical satelite networks listed in the back of the Matrix book. I'd list chapter and verse, but it is at home and I am at work. :(

[Eyeless Blond]

p. 47. Note that most are low-rating Reds and Oranges, but some are Green. Spy satelites I'd go with orange or red at least, I guess

[Guest_Overwatch_*]

Assuming you had your own dish, what would stop you from emulating your own signal to make the SAT think is was talking to it's corporate masters? Probably be a much easier hack than trapsing through MCTs laundry list of main frames and collecting tally like Emelda Marcos collected shoes.

Oh.. and it's Harold

[Backgammon]

Why do folks say "Jesus H. Christ"?

from google

[lollerskates]

[blakkie]

[blakkie]

On the the other hand the difficulty in accessing the satelite "host" could come from it acting more as an intellegent peripheral that could be designed in an arcanic, non-standard architeture. Costly to design and build, but satelites generally are and the system has to be designed to non-standard requirements anyway (power, space, weight, redundancy). So if you don't access it through the abstraction provided by the land-bound host, and without inside info on it's layout, your decker is mostly left scratching his head. Obscurity isn't always the best security but in the right situations, where you can assure the obscurity, it is a very effective complementary tactic.

[Edward]

I do like the idea of a constellation management host that would take requests and task satellites appropriately wit the various feeds from each satellite being mounted in a way not dissimilar to a Linux router or gatway box with many file servers and shared printers mounted on it, looking at eth box with user privileges you will not be able to tell witch assets are on witch physical computer.

Taking this to a SR satellite view again it dose not preclude the possibility of hacking in threw the satellites, each satellite has a smaller (although no less frigid) host on bord, this host is responsible for onboard guidance damage assessment and maintenance,

Your first problem using this back door is that you don’t know where they are, the locations of communications satellites are fixed (or easily predicted) but spy satalights want to be hidden and change there orbit from time to time

Second finding the satellite will only accept commands from known ground stations and other satellites in the constellation, even if you found your satellite you would have a hard time convincing it to admit that you exist, and you cant hack it if you don’t have an open data path.

Lastly the san from the satellite back down may not even head to a sensitive aria, those that are intended to use the individual hosts are technicians and the host capabilities will reflect that, the san down probably heads to the MCT security technical host, you could access the cameras yes but without the conformations from base station getting it to actually look at what you want would be tricky, eg you tell the satellite to look at Seattle, the satellite duly starts looking at Seattle and eth managing host notices these. The management host doesn’t know its supposed to be looking at Seattle (because its not) and tells it to look at Denver and logs a glich, security tally starts going up the more you try.

Edward

[blakkie]

I suppose you could have a network of satelites all linked to a key satelite with one to-ground connection. With a second satelite housing a second redunant. Physical insertion/interception between the satelites becomes extremely difficult since you'd have to put yourself, or a transponder, into orbit to do that.

Another problem you'll have cracking into those hosts, one that SR decking basically glosses over, is latency. It's around a minimum of an 1/4 of a second round trip surface to satelite (depending on the height of it's orbit, i'm assuming a geosyncronous orbit but observing ones could easily be lower). Pain in the ass speed of light :P Then you start jumping satelite to satelite and your latency goes through the roof.

Ever tried to play Quake with pings nearing 1000ms? :scatter:

[Gorath]

There is Angel Satellite Network at Target: Matrix (p. 8). There they say Red 8 or higher. So i think that should be the difficulty for something like this.

My question would be: that are the values for A/C/F/I/S? For surveillance sats it would be needed that you can change their direction or hop to the next satellite, as they usually have a low orbit (<400km) and move very fast. Or is it finde to just hack these router for the spy satelitte network?

[blakkie]

[FlakJacket]

If you don't want to have to hack through defences, you could always just buy time from some of the private recon satellites. There have been at least two or three mentioned that offer the service.

Edit: SotA 2064 has rules and ratings on surveillance staellites, although that deals mainly with national and megacorp constellations.

[Guest_Overwatch_*]

In order for a Sat to be free of the occasional dark time, it would need either multiple recieving stations with at least one always in it's "footprint". Or you could put the sat. in geosynchronous orbit. Which if my google serves me corectly is 35,786 kilometers up. In adddition, the spot that the sat was trying to stay over would have to be along earth's equatorial plane...aka on or near the equator.

[blakkie]

[blakkie]

[Edward]

I assume a satellite constellation consists of enough satellites that one will always be within LOS of the receiving station and they can always see the one in front and behind them, the satellites can all act as relays.

If you don’t have a constellation of your own then you leas (or hijack) time on communication satellites to act as relays for you.

The section on SANS in matrix is very interesting and gives a lot of options for increasing security but a lot of people seem to ignore it and focus on powerful hosts rather than intelligent system design, I would wager that I could make a system you could never hope to penetrate with a twinkled out Excalibur, all the programs and a computer skill of 12 using nothing more powerful that a green 6

Edward