On 18 February 2024, a missile attack from the Houthi militants in Yemen hit the cargo ship Rubymar in the Red Sea. With the crew evacuated, the disabled ship would take weeks to finally sink, becoming an symbol for the security of the global Internet in the process. Before it went down, the ship dragged its anchor behind it over an estimated 70 kilometers. The meandering anchor wound up severing three fiber-optic cables across the Red Sea floor, which carried about a quarter of all the Internet traffic between Europe and Asia. Data transmissions had to be rerouted as system engineers realized the cables had been damaged. So this year, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, will begin testing a plan to fix the vulnerability that the Rubymar’s sinking so vividly illustrated.
The world’s submarine fiber-optic lines carry more than
95 percent of intercontinental Internet communications. These tiny, drawn-out strands of glass fiber stretch some 1.2 million km around the planet, each line with the potential to become its own delicate choke point. Between 500 and 600 cables crisscross ocean floors worldwide.
“They’re not buried when they cross an ocean,” says
Tim Stronge, vice president of research at the telecommunications consulting firm TeleGeography. “They’re sitting right on the seafloor, and at oceanic depths, at deep-sea depths, they’re about this thick”—he makes a circle with his fingers—“less than a garden hose. They’re fragile.”
Undersea fiber-optic cables, by some estimates, are used for
more than US $10 trillion in financial transactions every day, as well as encrypted defense communications and other digital communications. If one sinking ship could accidentally take out a portion of global data transmission, what could happen in an organized attack by a determined government?
Enter NATO, which has now launched a
pilot project to figure out how best to protect global Internet traffic and redirect it when there’s trouble. The project is called HEIST, short for hybrid space-submarine architecture ensuring infosec of telecommunications. (“Infosec” is short for “information security.”)
The Houthis probably had no idea what damage they would do by attacking the
Rubymar, but Western officials say there’s considerable evidence that Russia and China have tried to sabotage undersea cables. As this article was going to press, two undersea cables in the Baltic Sea—connecting Sweden with Lithuania and Finland with Germany—had been severed, with suspicion resting on a Chinese merchant vessel in the region. Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, went so far as to call the outages “sabotage.”
“What we’re talking about now is critical infrastructure in the society.” —Henric Johnson, vice-chancellor, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden
This year and next, the organizers of HEIST say they hope to achieve at least two objectives: First, to ensure that when cables are damaged, operators will know their precise location quickly in order to mitigate disruptions. Second, the project aims to expand the number of pathways for data to travel. In particular, HEIST will be investigating ways to divert high-priority traffic to satellites in orbit.
“The name of the game when it comes to enabling resilient communication is path diversity,” says
Gregory Falco, the NATO Country Director for HEIST and an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University. Ensuring a diversity of Internet pathways, he says, should include “something in the sky rather than [just] what’s on the seabed.”
Testing a Fail-Safe
In 2025, HEIST’s organizers plan to begin testing at the
Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) in Karlskrona, on the southern coast of Sweden. There, they will experiment with smart systems that they hope will allow engineers to quickly locate a break in an undersea cable with 1-meter accuracy. The researchers will also work on protocols that quickly route data transmissions to available satellites, at least on an experimental scale. And, Falco says, they will try to sort out the thicket of overlapping rules for the use of submarine cables, since there is no one entity that oversees them. Researchers from Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, and other countries are involved.
“What we’re talking about now is critical infrastructure
in the society,” says Henric Johnson, vice-chancellor of BTH and coordinator of the HEIST testbed effort. Its location, on the coast of the Baltic Sea, is important: It’s a vital waterway both for NATO countries and for the Russians. “We have had incidents of cables that have been sabotaged between Sweden, Estonia, and Finland,” says Johnson. “So those incidents are for us a reality.”
TeleGeography’s Stronge says that even without any deliberate sabotage, there are about 100 cable cuts a year, most of them fixed by specialized ships on standby in ports around the world. A single repair can take
days or weeks and cost several million U.S. dollars. But up to now, telecom operators—and many countries—have had no choice.
“Think about Iceland,” says
Nicolò Boschetti, a Cornell doctoral student working on HEIST. “Iceland has a lot of financial services, a lot of cloud computing, and it is connected to Europe and North America by four cables. If those four cables get destroyed or compromised, Iceland is completely isolated from the world.”
Satellite links can bypass damaged cables, but perhaps the biggest limitation of satellite backups is their throughput. The volume of data that can be transmitted to orbit is orders of magnitude less than what fiber optics currently handle.
Google says some of its newer fiber-optic lines can handle 340 terabits per second; most cables carry less, but still dramatically outperform the 5 gigabits per second that NASA says can be sent via satellite in the Ku band (12–18 gigahertz), a widely used microwave frequency.
“[The undersea cables] are not buried when they cross an ocean. They’re sitting right on the seafloor, and at oceanic depths, at deep-sea depths. … They’re fragile.” —Tim Stronge, vice president of research, TeleGeography
The HEIST team plans to work on this, in part, by using higher bandwidth
laser optics systems to communicate with satellites. NASA has long been working on optical communications, most recently with an experiment carried on board its Psyche asteroid mission. Starlink has equipped its newest satellites with infrared lasers for intersatellite communications, and officials from Amazon’s Project Kuiper have said the company plans to use laser communications as well. NASA says satellite lasers can carry at least 40 times as much data as radio transmissions—still far short of cable capacity, but it’s significant progress.
Laser transmissions still have limitations. They’re easily blocked by clouds, haze, or smoke, for example. They must be aimed with precision. Delayed signals (also known as latency) are also an issue, especially for satellites in higher orbits. The HEIST team says it will be testing out new ways to expand bandwidth and shrink signal delay time—for instance, by
aggregating available radio frequencies, and by prioritizing what data gets sent in case of trouble. “So there are ways around this,” says Cornell’s Falco, “but none of them are a silver bullet.”
Falco says a key to finding good answers is an open-source process at HEIST. “We’re going to make it super-public, and we’re going to want people to poke a lot of holes in it,” he says. He says give-and-take and repeated reinvention will be essential for the project’s next phase. “We’re going to enable this capability,” he says, “faster than anyone would have believed.”
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