Experts: New submarine can tap fiber optic cables

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http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/18/s [...] index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The USS Jimmy Carter, set to join the nation's
submarine fleet Saturday, will have some special capabilities,
intelligence experts say: It will be able to tap undersea cables and
eavesdrop on the communications passing through them.

The Navy does not acknowledge that the $3.2 billion submarine, the third
and last of the Seawolf class of attack subs, has this capability.

"There are limits to what I can say on the sub's capabilities, but let's
just say the Jimmy Carter is uniquely capable to perform missions
vitally important to the war on terror," said Rep. Rob Simmons, a
Republican and former CIA officer whose district includes Groton,
Connecticut, where the sub was built.

-----------

Um, does this sound like a 3.2 billion dollar fantasy or what?

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"Joe Sensor" <crabcakes@emagic.net> wrote in message
news:37ntrcF3rlcu0U1@individual.net
> http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/18/s [...] index.html
>
> WASHINGTON (AP) -- The USS Jimmy Carter, set to join the nation's
> submarine fleet Saturday, will have some special capabilities,
> intelligence experts say: It will be able to tap undersea cables and
> eavesdrop on the communications passing through them.
>
> The Navy does not acknowledge that the $3.2 billion submarine, the
> third and last of the Seawolf class of attack subs, has this
> capability.

This is old news. It's pretty well known that like 20 years ago the US
tapped a Soviet optical cable in the Pacific Ocean, spliced in a underwater
recorder, and revisited the recorder and dumped its contents any number of
times.

http://www.politrix.org/foia/nsa/nsa-fibertap.htm

"The much more interesting problem that gets rather short shrift in the WSJ
article is how the real time time critical intercepts get from a submarine
hiding in stealth 1200 feet under the ocean to Fort Meade and then to policy
makers. Some fraction of the traffic is still interesting after weeks or
months when tapes or disks can be flown back to Fort Meade but much more of
it is only useful if it is available within seconds or minutes during a
crisis and not weeks or months later. Traditional microwave radio and
satellite intercepts get back to Fort Meade or the RSOCs in milliseconds but
as more and more traffic flows through cables that can only be tapped by
hiding billion dollar nuclear submarines a lot of the timeliness of NSA
operations goes away.

"The IVY BELLS tap technology exmplyed against Soviet analog undersea cables
in the 70s allegedly involved hooking up a nuclear radioisotope powered pod
with tape recorders in it that was left in place for almost a year between
submarine visits to recover the tapes - this would be rather hard to do with
the gigabytes per second flowing through a modern fiber cable - there is no
(unclassified) recording technology with anything like the storage capacity
to record everything or even a significant fraction of everything for that
long a period in a form factor that would fit in a pod on the sea floor.

"According to published accounts, in the early Reagan years the intelligence
community considered running their own fiber cable to the tap site on the
Soviet analog cables to recover the data in real time - I imagine that the
same thing has been considered as a solution to the current problem of
recovering data from undersea fiber taps while it is still fresh enough to
be useful. But in general it is a harder problem than actually tapping the
cable or dealing with the rivers of data it contains.

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In article <111edrjnre1n121@corp.supernews.com>, williams@nwlink.com
says...
> I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which depends on total
> internal reflection for efficient transmission.

Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?

Now, tapping it undetected, that's different. But the article didn't
say that, and I imagine that's not possible... I wonder if the vagaries
of undersea communication (storms?) lead to brief outages that would
look roughly the same as a cable interrupt? I'm way out of my depth
here (hah).


--
Jay Levitt |
Wellesley, MA | Hi!
Faster: jay at jay dot eff-em | Where are we going?
http://www.jay.fm | Why am I in this handbasket?

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Jay Levitt <jay+news@jay.fm> wrote:
>In article <111edrjnre1n121@corp.supernews.com>, williams@nwlink.com
>says...
>> I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which depends on total
>> internal reflection for efficient transmission.
>
>Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?

Yes, which is the problem. You get a dropout in the process. Most of the
"undetectable" processes involve bending the fibre slightly so that there
is some slight leakage of light at the bend point. But this also causes
a slight impedance change at that point as well, which can be detected
with a TDR. On the other hand, the other guys don't necessarily know
what the change is... it could be some natural seabed movement causing
mechanical flexing too. So they have to send someone down to investigate
and that could take some time. But you get very little light off doing
this, which limits you to relatively low bandwidth.

I don't know if these lines are pressurized.... I think that would be hard
to do for an undersea line. But I know that most underground secure lines
are pressurized to a couple atmospheres, so that you can tell if the line
has been breached somewhere by the loss of pressure. This is one of the
tricks that came out of the research after the big tap in Berlin in the
fifties.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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Jay Levitt wrote:

> I wonder if the vagaries
> of undersea communication (storms?) lead to brief outages that would
> look roughly the same as a cable interrupt?

I can't see that. What could a storm or anything else do to a cable to
cause a brief outage? Unless maybe it's a Hosa fiber optic cable.

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"Jay Levitt" <jay+news@jay.fm> wrote in message
news:MPG.1c81197d3fa267fc989890@news-east.giganews.com
> In article <111edrjnre1n121@corp.supernews.com>, williams@nwlink.com
> says...
>> I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which
>> depends on total internal reflection for efficient transmission.
>
> Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?
>
> Now, tapping it undetected, that's different. But the article didn't
> say that, and I imagine that's not possible...

What if the head-end equipment was implemented with say, vacuum tubes?

AFAIK the USSR were late adopters of SS technology.

I knew a solider who was stationed in the region where this happened. He
didn't have a lot good to say about his commanders.

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normanstrong@comcast.net wrote:
>
> I don't think they "tap" the line. They intercept the signal, read it,
> regenerate it and send it out again. It's called a repeater.


So how do they "intercept" it without tapping the line?

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Rob Reedijk wrote:
>
> aren't fibre optic cables usually
> constructed of thousands of "strands" each carry difference
> channels or blocks of channels?

Terrestrial longhaul networks often use 144 or 216 count fiber. Undersea fiber is a much more specialized beast, and due to the amplifiers needed typically has 4-8 lit fibers (plus a few spares of course.)





> How could you separate individual channels from this mess?

It's what technologists call a "non-trivial task."

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Pure fantasy i.m.o.

Jedd Haas wrote:


> I read an article which described some scenarios for this underwater fiber
> tapping. As I recall, the theory of how to do it went something like this.
> First, you bring a section of the cable into your "manipulation
> compartment" which is probably shaped like a large tube on the outside of
> the sub. Then the water gets pumped out. Then you use remote manipulators
> to operate on the fiber optic cable to add the tap.
>
> Presumably, you could use the "bending" trick that Scott Dorsey described
> earlier to add a temporary "bypass" fiber to the cable; then you could cut
> the actual fiber, add a "T" connection tap, and tap away.
>
> The article mentioned that these underwater cables carry around 10,000
> volts, DC, to power the repeaters. It's that high due to the voltage loss
> over the length of the cable. So there you are, a mile or two underwater,
> running your remote-control pliers on a 10kV cable. Careful now...
>

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Noel Bachelor wrote:
> On or about Sat, 19 Feb 2005 09:38:40 -0500, Jay Levitt allegedly wrote:
>
>> Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?
>
>
> They already have repeaters along the cable every x km depending on the
> cable clarity. The trunk cables used across Australia have repeaters
> about every 20 to 30km. I understand they go for the highest clarity of
> glass for deep sea cables to maximise repeater distance to reduce the
> number that have to be powered.
>
> Anyway, those repeaters have to have electronics, which opens the
> possibility of sniffing around them.

The electronics are not signal-carrying; they're more of a light pump (think laser.)

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William Sommerwerck wrote:
>> The electronics are not signal-carrying; they're more of a light pump
>> (think laser.)
>
> They _have_ to demodulate the signal and retransmit it. I don't know any other
> way of boosting the level.

Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers have changed the landscape in recent years.

<http://www.optronics.gr/Tutorials/fiberamp.htm>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0120845903/>

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

In terms of copper networking, one shoots the cable to the length of the
fault based on ohms. If, perhaps, we have a setup that allows the system to
be monitored at repeater points, both backwards and forwards in order to
determine opens in the system lines, one could essentially tie into those
points and intercept traffic ala a network sniffer. It doesn't make sense
to lay cable of any kind without the ability to monitor where possible
breaks would lie, because it would then take a tremendous amount of effort
in dollars and time to find a break and repair it. Assuming that a certain
level of redundancy is built into such a fiber system, the need to visit a
location might well be put off for months, or be systemically failure
specific, which means that it's not worth the effort to repair but rather
replace, and depending on capacity, that might be years. However, one would
need to know a more exacting location rather than a visual search of 30 kM
of cable and perhaps not notice a slight imperfection. So it stands to
reason that one would employ cable shooting points into the system for such
information as in Ideal Industries' FiberTek and TraceTek LAN Fiber Kits.
These allow exactly the abilities for system tracing I outlined above.
Whether these particular products have implementation in the field of
undersea fiber optics is probably somewhere along the lines of national
security concerns, but any application that works in typical land based
systems certainly should have modifiable capabilities to employ it in more
extreme situations, or the company is missing out on contract opportunities.

If, indeed we are talking some 1200 meters below surface (3/4 of a mile), or
more, than it's imperative that no operations take place that put deep sea
divers into the mix (not that it's not possible, but the decompression times
would be extreme to humans), so obviously robotic arm access/application
specific service points would apply. Also, repeaters need power sources
which can't be powered by light (actually I think they sufficiently could be
powered by light, but the amount of cable to do so might exceed the required
need to produce volume of data), so you have somewhat of a possibility that
cable troubleshooting might be based on electrical deviance from the norm
which is traceable, since if the power runs along the same undersea cable
conduit a fault in an optical cable may well be represented by an electical
fault at or near the same location (as in the geological disturbance that
created the Dec 26th tsunami), assuming that some undersea turbulence
accounts for the interruption of service for that particular line. And it's
hard to see how any monitoring station could suggest anything other than a
disturbance of unknown origin if some portion of the system fails. I guess
one might need access to geological disturbance data and realtime visual
satellite security monitoring to make a reasonable estimation of whether a
fault was generated by a disturbance of natural occurance as opposed to a
manned intercession, but still we'd be talking about days unless a sub
happened to be in the general vicinity.

In other words, as a prior networking professional, I can see a number of
ways that it could be done. I don't, however, know what specific
technologies it would take to do so on the ocean floor. I can give a good
guess, and I assume there are tons of people that do know, and so the above
simply uses my experience in one technology and applies it to a newer one,
of which I've seen nothing that says the above doesn't apply. Given a
couple of months to a year I could probably either design a system that
couldn't be tapped, or design a system that would tap the untappable, either
until new technology applied. I can conceive of multi-fibered
spread-spectrum transmissions that would effectively halt tapping until much
faster communications computers were available where each packet transmitted
held the information about where the next packet transmission could be
located within the spectrum. Data conduits would have to be MUCH larger,
but if one uses packet division by spectrum on a rotating basis, it then
becomes incumbant upon those that want to receive those packets to be able
to accurately predict the spectrum which the next packet will be broadcast.
Once a transmission packet goes by, it's all lost and the circle starts over
again. At today's data rates, I doubt seriously that transmission
interception would present much in the way of timely information, even if
all pertinent information was recorded and decrypted at some later date.
Might be a good way to historically represent events, but not to have
immediate knowledge.

But even if I can't accomplish what I've suggested, I know there are people
that can, and I know some of them.

--


Roger W. Norman
SirMusic Studio
http://blogs.salon.com/0004478/

"Joe Sensor" <crabcakes@emagic.net> wrote in message
news:37pnb3F5fgb5aU1@individual.net...
> normanstrong@comcast.net wrote:
> >
> > I don't think they "tap" the line. They intercept the signal, read it,
> > regenerate it and send it out again. It's called a repeater.
>
>
> So how do they "intercept" it without tapping the line?

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> The real plus is you do not have to fish the cable and upgrade
> repeaters to upgrade the link to higher speeds. Just change the
> ends, and away you go. The parametric pumping does not care
> about the modulation, only the base frequency.

But the modulation creates sidebands. What happens if they're more than a few
percent away from the base frequency?

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"Noel Bachelor" <see.my.sig@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:4219b6ee.385169314@news.bigpond.com...
> On or about Sat, 19 Feb 2005 09:38:40 -0500, Jay Levitt allegedly wrote:
>
> > In article <111edrjnre1n121@corp.supernews.com>, williams@nwlink.com
> > says...
> > > I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which depends
on total
> > > internal reflection for efficient transmission.
> >
> > Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?
>
> They already have repeaters along the cable every x km depending on the
> cable clarity. The trunk cables used across Australia have repeaters
> about every 20 to 30km. I understand they go for the highest clarity of
> glass for deep sea cables to maximise repeater distance to reduce the
> number that have to be powered.
>
> Anyway, those repeaters have to have electronics, which opens the
> possibility of sniffing around them.
>
>
> Noel Bachelor noelbachelorAT(From:_domain)
> Language Recordings Inc (Darwin Australia)

SMOF (Single Mode Optical Fibre) operating at wavelengths of 1550nm or
1625nm carrying digitally multiplexed signals need only be regenerated
(repeated) every 100km. Most of the bigger telcos like Telstra (Australia's
largest telco) regenerate the optical signals every 50km or thereabouts with
high capacity 2.5Gbs/s WDM (wave division multiplexed) terrestrial systems.

Undersea systems require a high voltage (1000's of volts) power feeding
system to power up the regenerators which is fed via thick copper conductor
within the armoured sheathing.

Tapping into the cable would be easiest at a regenerator housing but this
would mean either bringing the cable and the regenerator to the surface or
rigging up a fairly elaborate setup in a submarine.

Tapping the cable at the fibre is possible by accessing the individual
fibres and placing a slight bend in the fibre which allows a small part of
the light travelling in the core to escape into the cladding and eventually
out of the fibre. A suitable and highly sensitive photodiode (Avalanche
Photo diode) would "read" the light pulses and pass these onto a demodulator
and then in turn to demultiplexing equipment to extract individual channels
or circuits.

Tapping into the fibre using the "bend the fibre" technique is the least
intrusive method. However it is only unlikely to go completely undetected
if the tapping is done between two undersea regenerators as OTDRs (Optical
Time Domain Reflectometers) used to locate optical fibre faults can't "see
through" regenerators.

All telecommunications systems (non-military) conform to ITU-T standards and
their variants which makes demultiplexing signals easy. However end users
can still encrypt their signals or data before transmission so simply
demultiplexing them doesn't automatically allow the "tapper" to be able to
decode the message.

Cheers,
Alan