Could You Hack Into Mars Curiosity Rover? 452
MrSeb writes "NASA's Curiosity rover has now been on the surface of Mars for just over a week. It hasn't moved an inch after landing, instead focusing on orienting itself (and NASA's scientists) by taking instrument readings and snapping images of its surroundings. The first beautiful full-color images of Gale Crater are starting to trickle in, and NASA has already picked out some interesting rock formations that it will investigate further in the next few days. Over the weekend and continuing throughout today, however, Curiosity is attempting something very risky indeed: A firmware upgrade. This got me thinking: If NASA can transmit new software to a Mars rover that's hundreds of millions of miles away... why can't a hacker do the same thing? In short, there's no reason a hacker couldn't take control of Curiosity, or lock NASA out. All you would need is your own massive 230-foot dish antenna and a 400-kilowatt transmitter — or, perhaps more realistically, you could hack into NASA's computer systems, which is exactly what Chinese hackers did 13 times in 2011."
DSN on the Internet ? (Score:5, Informative)
Surely the OP doesn't think the DSN is on the Internet ? It sure wasn't when I worked with it, and that was at a time when that sort of protection might have seemed paranoid.
stupid article is extremely stupid (Score:5, Informative)
yeah, if you could build 1:1 repllica of nasa's antenna and control operation, including encoding and possible crypt, you could hack into curiosity.
and yeah, if you could enter nasa's facilities to upload the data from there you could hack into curiosity.
somehow you should maybe be more worried about hacking into nuclear subs since the methods would essentially be the same.. and pretty much "just as easy"(I would expect curiosity control channel to have some signing system for the code it accepts..).
Re:dd (Score:5, Informative)
The mars orbiters are already basically space wireless routers. If MRO weren't so broken, they'd have a high bandwidth relay link to earth through it.
The short range link between the lander and the orbiters is Proximity-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity-1_Space_Link_Protocol [wikipedia.org]
stop with the high school journalism headlines (Score:2, Informative)
Ending headlines with question marks screams amateur. Hey editors... why don't you, you know, EDIT ?!
Re:Proxy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is a great way... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Real Question: (Score:5, Informative)
Due to Curiosity's nature, the onboard electronic systems need to be radiation-hardened. Not jjust "tin-foil cover" hardened. I'm talking engineered from the ground-up to resist data corruption from external radiation sources. This comes at extreme cost, both financially and physically. Every little bit of extra RAM or Flash storage adds weight to the rover unit, and by extent, tons (literally) of extra fuel to carry it that full 225,000,000km. It's not as easy as plugging in a thumb drive or popping an extra disk in there. If it really were, do you think the rocket scientists at NASA would have thought about that before they shot a billion-dollar robot into the sky?
I know you think you're being all geeky and clever, but seriously. If you aspire to second-guess every engineering decision that NASA makes, perhaps you should apply for a management position there.
Re:dd (Score:4, Informative)
Two reasons:
1 - the bands they're using aren't stopped by clouds. lasers (as in light) are.
2 - A 50-kW laser shooting a drone out of the sky:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hs9vmlEd-A [youtube.com]
Re:The Real Question: (Score:2, Informative)
So... the rover was responsible for the flight systems of its own delivery mechanism?
And this is bad, why? Better to have one very rigorously tested and radiation-hardened system than two separate ones, especially if regardless of where you put the "brain" you need the same back-and-forth connections to sensors, actuators, etc.
Fun Fact: The airplane was invented by a couple of hillbillies, in a bike shed. Education can be overrated.
Hillbillies whose parents at one point were going to send at least one of them to Yale, and who at various times ran their own printing-presses and manufactured their own line of bicycles. Not exactly playin' the washtub bass...
Re:Wikipedia has something to say about this threa (Score:3, Informative)
Again, hackers would do i because it is there,
also note that what you are revering to "Hacker Emblem" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Emblem [wikipedia.org] has little to do with computer hacking
Re:If it's not on the screen it never happened!! (Score:4, Informative)
The human mind is very, incredibly, unbelievably good at finding correlations and explanations for things. In schizophrenics, the part that rejects 99.99% of "proposed" correlations and explanations as bullshit is broken.