Is Breakthrough Starshot a Threat to National Security?
The initiative known as Breakthrough Starshot and their nano-spacecraft concept StarChip have made a lot of headlines since the 2016 announcement of the first planned flyby mission to the nearby exoplanet Proxima Centauri b. The announcement was made by the initiative’s main financial backer, Russian venture-capitalist Yuri Milner, alongside the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking.
In the less than three years since, prototype StarChips called Sprites have already been launched into orbit. Not only does the initiative present to be the only feasible connection to another solar system in our lifetime, it may also prove pivotal to future generations seeking to colonize nearby stars.
There’s still a long road ahead for Breakthrough Initiatives and the many enthusiasts supporting their cause. As reported in 2016 by The Economist, a variety of technologies must be significantly advanced before these nanoships can be launched toward a neighboring star. And if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, the proposed light propulsion mechanism will require an enormous, and potentially dangerous ground-based laser.
If you’re wondering how a laser directed away from the planet’s surface could be considered dangerous, essentially its because the 100GW laser will have to be focused on the nanoships by an array of mirrors orbiting the Earth. If these mirrors were to redirect the beam toward a particular location on Earth, the impact would be equivalent to the yield of the nuclear bomb that devastated Hiroshima.
In-truth, the chance of the laser presenting any real risk is marginal so long as the mirrors remain static. However, if these mirrors can be manipulated remotely, Breakthrough Starshot could indeed be exploited by a genocidal adversary. Even assuming an international legislative body finds a feasible path to regulating the project, remote manipulation by rogue nations, terrorist groups, and hacking sects could still become a prominent worry.
The solution to such concerns should be simple, satellites use instruments known as gyrostats to measure their attitude, a property that describes a body’s orientation with respect to the Earth’s horizon. So in-theory, all that would be required to prevent a national calamity is to ensure the laser doesn’t receive power unless the measurements from the gyrostat(s) can be verified from Earth. But how can you verify a gyrostat reading is legitimate and hasn’t been forged by an adversarial hacker?
To verify data received from a satellite is legitimate, a traditional crypto-verification scheme would function like this:
First, a computer located in a command-center on the ground might begin by generating two 100 digit prime numbers, p and q along with the product m=pq. This would be followed by the generation of two 200-digit numbers, d and e, such that (p-1)(q-1) is a divisor of ed-1. The numbers m and e, would be available ‘publicly’ accessible to the satellite. However, the numbers p, q, and d will only be known to the computer in the command-center, and not to the satellite in-orbit or anyone else. In this way, the number d is referred to as the command-center’s private-key, and the number e as it’s public-key.
Now, suppose the ground computer, in preparation of authorizing discharge of a 100GW laser into space, sends a request to our satellite for the all-important gyrostat reading. Let’s say this data (or part of the data) is the number x, a non-negative integer less than m. The satellite then computes the remainder of xe modulo m, letting r be this remainder.
The command-center receives only this remainder r from the satellite. They can then decrypt (i.e., determine x) by using their private-key d, and running through essentially the same procedure as the satellite did when the integer was initially calculated. This results in computing the remainder of rd modulo m, the remainder being seen to be the decrypted gyrostat data x.
This scheme functions to protect the data from being accessed by individuals without the command-center’s private-key. But alone, this does nothing to verify who the original sender was. Luckily, verifying a sender’s identity can be as easy as the operations outlined above. This can be implemented easily by assigning the satellite it’s own private- and public-keys.
This time, instead of just encrypting once with the command-center’s public-key, the satellite encrypts the data first with it’s own private-key and appends a signature such as an IP address or similar identification before encrypting again with the command-center’s public-key. Therefore, when the command-center receives the data, they will decrypt the first part of the string with their own private-key. This will return another encrypted string but with the satellite’s signature decrypted. The satellite’s decrypted signature can then be referenced to look-up that device’s public-key in a secure database to reveal the gyrostat data, all while verifying the data is indeed legitimate and not tampered with or forged.
So essentially, modern encryption/verification is dependent on nothing more than the computational complexity of processing extremely large prime numbers. It is therefore not a lack of information that keeps data safe and secure, but rather the insurmountable amount of information that these algorithms create.
As insuperable as such algorithms have so-far proven to be at protecting the world’s most valued secrets, something that has long been considered a national-security threat is that the computational safeguard of these large numbers could be overcome, if/when one of our foreign adversaries successfully matures the quantum-computer. In such an event, the NSA-designed algorithms that secure the banking institutions and electrical-grid of every major nation in the world could be rendered entirely useless by the burgeoning of unprecedented processing capabilities.
But imagine if the world’s nuclear weapons were dependent only upon these same encryption-schemes. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the threat Breakthrough Starshot poses in the context of a new age in supercomputing.
In spite of the legitimacy of these concerns, Breakthrough Starshot does present to be one of the most significant achievements in human history and certainly shouldn’t be scrapped over hyperbolic fears. However members of legislative bodies around the world should be made aware of the potential threats now, so that the necessary steps can be taken before its too late.
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