Help - Search - Members - Calendar
Full Version: Host for espionage stallite?
Dumpshock Forums > Discussion > Shadowrun
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
QUOTE (lollerskates)
hippo.

rotfl.gif
Shanshu Freeman
QUOTE (lollerskates)
hippo.

I thought it was Horatio?


PS: are you from Genmay?
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. frown.gif
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
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
QUOTE (Shanshu Freeman)
PS:  are you from Genmay?

i'll tell you if you tell me what that is.

wait, i guess that means no. wink.gif
blakkie
QUOTE (lollerskates @ Jun 29 2005, 06:20 AM)
QUOTE (Shanshu Freeman)
PS:  are you from Genmay?

i'll tell you if you tell me what that is.

wait, i guess that means no. wink.gif

What I want to know is why so many different languages have localized versions for the name of the country Germany that sound nothing like each other. I know at the least it is different in French, Serbo-Croatian (which also has a very different country name from the English "Croatia"), and English from each other and from the German Deutschland.

Oddly in English we do acknowledge the Deutschmark name for the currency. I'm not sure about that in those other languages since i don't speak them, and i never bothered to ask the SO who is trilingual (English as third language).

EDIT: Got topic drift? smile.gif So back to the satelite, you'd could take a shot at getting to the live data through the bound-land host, which is likely some off-the-scale CIA type host that might not even be accessable from off-site.

Or you could try get close enough to the physical column where the transmission is taking place as they would be using a tightly directed beam of communication. You would then proceed to attempt to crack one of the hairest encryption schemes you are likely to come across....short of trying to tap into the main line to the Z-O (see related thread).

After you manage to crack the encryption i wouldn't see the spy satelite having the worst host on board to deal with. As pointed out even if it was bleeding edge when they put it up, it has space and power constraints, along with limits on its upgrading. Mostly software, hardware upgrades being extremely expensive and difficult to install.
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 nyahnyah.gif Then you start jumping satelite to satelite and your latency goes through the roof.

Ever tried to play Quake with pings nearing 1000ms? scatter.gif
Gorath
There is Angel Satellite Network at Target: Matrix (p. cool.gif. 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
QUOTE (Gorath @ Jun 29 2005, 08:57 AM)
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?

I could be wrong, and someone correct me if i am, but my understanding is that current observation satelites store up their data and then transmit when they pass by a receiving station. So they go dark for periods of time.

To have them in continuous contact you'd have to go up to a higher orbiting hub that, unconstrained by the earth and it's atmosphere could then keep nearly constant communications with them. You'd need at least two of the hubs to switch between when the low obiters went to the farside of the earth, but the two hubs could be placed to keep a clear LOS with each other.

EDIT: This system would have a minimum latency time to reach any given low orbiting satelite of nearly 1/2 second. Upwards to 3/4 a second or more if the signal has to bounce off the second hub and then down to the low orbiter.
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.
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
QUOTE (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.

WTF are you talking about? Only chumps pay for stuff. wink.gif
blakkie
QUOTE (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.

P.S. The earth-satelite link station on the ground for a geosync satelite doesn't have to be on the equator though. It is just less atmosphere to get in the way the lower their latitude and the closer they are to the point the satelite is placed over.
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
Gorath
An Excalibur has MPCP 12, so it could have DF 15 in Masking Mode (if you allow 2 hp dice =+1 DF you could go upto DF 18). Your Green-6 would have to roll ~9 system tests (~36) to get one success. Thats much time for a decker to slice your Green-6 host. So, how can you stop a decker with SANs?
Edward
The most likely way is to use lots of hosts, with hidden, triggered and timed sans you could be poking around the maze for hours, making hundreds of system tests before you get what your looking for, unfortunately that would slow down legitimate users almost as much. Or just have a long line of hosts, having employs take a 1 min stroll down a corridor of doors (sans between virtual hosts) wouldn’t impact productivity to badly and would get you an easy 50 hosts, each of witch must have its san cracked and be logged onto, there is 100 tests, 600 dice rolled against your detection factor. But that’s the cheesy wy to do it

Lets say however you want the FBI witness protection database (and lets face it that host is worth nuyen). Where do you look, if you don’t know you will probably never find it, at least not without chasing down a large number of false leads first (false leads deliberately placed there as well

Let me propose appropriate facts of the matter to illustrate my point properly.

The FBI has a public host and a staff only host behind witch are the departments, in each departments host there will be a number of sans that lead to a single host, all with hidden or triggered sans, possibly trapdoor whatever just sans that look like they might lead somewhere interesting, the users of the system don’t even know where they go, just that most of them are part of the security system and thy should never enter one without knowing where it goes. In truth they all lead to one of a small number of hosts where they want unweary to fall, could be killing rooms could be a repaint IC (naked) and dump you in the middle of the virtual Seattle mall, for law enforcement my favoured would be a sealed room (no exit san) and packed tight with trace and report IC. The several highly sensitive hosts are behind a few of those sans, there is no way to find out where.

In the coroners department filing cabinets are modelled as body storage cells (like a very big coroners office) if suitably inspected on of the sells is actually 10 triggered sans (this is not uncommon around here) buy taking the file john do 7385 (one of a hundred files that on closer inspection are linked to triggers) and file it under S (all the trays are set up to trigger a report when a file is placed into them) when you next pull out the body slab you can climb onto it and it will close the san has been triggered and will send you to the host with the witness protection records in it, now you need to negotiate the database.

Without getting somebody to tell you the way in you would be forever trying to ago threw random sans and being chased or taking dump shock when trapped in a tracing room, and there wont be many people that know that information, every matrix coder that worked for them would have put in a small number of dummy sans but wont know which of the ones he didn’t code are real.

Edward
FlakJacket
QUOTE (Edward)
Lets say however you want the FBI witness protection database (and lets face it that host is worth nuyen). Where do you look, if you don’t know you will probably never find it, at least not without chasing down a large number of false leads first (false leads deliberately placed there as well).

Plus the fact that they'd never keep that thing on-line but burried five or six stories below their headquarters in a vault that makes Fort Knox look like a kids piggybank.
Edward
Good point, but that design works well for the most sensitive of data that for practical reasons must be assessable from the matrix.

Another good measure is an externally triggered san, to incorporate into my prior example before you get onto the slab you must inform an agent of your intentions and when your on the slab you don’t go anywhere until a code is entered on a different host (so you cant do it yourself), this means you need to convince that agent (and I am meaning FBI agent not agent program) that you belong or have an accomplice (and finding the san trigger will be another tricky step for the both of you).

Edward
SL James
QUOTE (Edward)
Lets say however you want the FBI witness protection database (and lets face it that host is worth nuyen). Where do you look, if you don’t know you will probably never find it, at least not without chasing down a large number of false leads first (false leads deliberately placed there as well

First being that you'd be looking in the wrong agency's system.

[edit]
That is, you'd want to look in the UCAS Marshals Service system.
[/edit]

QUOTE (FlakJacket)
Plus the fact that they'd never keep that thing on-line but burried five or six stories below their headquarters in a vault that makes Fort Knox look like a kids piggybank.

Security through obscurity. If there was such a thing, aside from being offline it's probably safer sitting in an anonymous office building somewhere in northern Virginia or suburban Maryland.
This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.
Dumpshock Forums © 2001-2012