{"id":6531,"date":"2020-12-22T18:14:42","date_gmt":"2020-12-22T23:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cointelegraph.com\/magazine\/?p=6531"},"modified":"2020-12-22T18:14:42","modified_gmt":"2020-12-22T23:14:42","slug":"moon-man-mission-to-blast-crypto-satellite-into-orbit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cointelegraph.com\/magazine\/2020\/12\/22\/moon-man-mission-to-blast-crypto-satellite-into-orbit","title":{"rendered":"Space invaders: Launching crypto into orbit"},"content":{"rendered":"
At first glance, an out-of-this-world plan to launch a network of crypto satellites into space, sounds like one of those grandiose ideas that never got much further than a vague outline in an ICO white paper back in 2017.<\/strong><\/p>\n But when the plan comes from a team including a Google X engineer and the co-founder of the first private mission to reach the moon, the project suddenly seems a lot more feasible.<\/p>\n The idea behind CryptoSat \u2014 which was indeed first outlined<\/a> in a November 2017 paper \u2014 is to build a prototype nano-satellite the size of a coffee mug and launch it into outer space, where it can act as a perfectly isolated and secure cryptographic module.<\/p>\n Once the concept is proven \u2014 sometime next year hopefully \u2014 an entire constellation of CryptoSats can be launched to orbit the Earth, providing blockchain infrastructure that can be used for everything from mining to timestamping documents.<\/p>\n While it isn’t the first project to combine blockchain and space \u2014 Blockstream and SpaceChain do as well \u2014\u00a0 CryptoSat has some unique features and an impressive core team.<\/p>\n As private space programs scale up, it\u2019s become surprisingly affordable to build a ‘CubeSat<\/a>‘ using off-the-shelf components, and then book some spare capacity on a launch to get it into orbit. There are more than one-thousand nano-satellites flying about up there.<\/p>\n The project is the brainchild of two Stanford graduates: SpaceIL<\/a> co-founder Yonatan Winetraub, 34, and the Chief Technology Officer of Anjuna Security<\/a>, Yan Michalevsky, 38. The pair got chatting a few year\u2019s back over a cup of coffee about Trusted Execution Environments<\/a> (TEEs) \u2014 which is the most secure part of computing infrastructure. TEEs use tamper proof-hardware to provide strong protection for things like cryptographic keys.<\/p>\n Down here on Earth, there\u2019s always the danger that someone able to get physically close to the hardware could steal keys using sneaky cache timing attacks, or doing tricksy things by observing its electromagnetic or acoustic signals. To guard against this, many people invest in expensive Hardware Security Modules (HSMs<\/a>) to store keys and securely sign transactions and certificates. They cost anywhere from tens of thousands of dollars to more than $100,000.<\/p>\n But for a comparable amount of USD, the pair realized, you could fire the entire thing into space where the data and computations would be totally protected from adversarial physical access and be almost as immutable and untouchable as the Bitcoin genesis block.<\/p>\n Michalevsky\u2019s company deals in this sort of hardware security on earth. He believes the costs of a satellite stack up to HSMs. “This alternative of launching simple satellites into space can be potentially even cheaper than that,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cIt can provide what we hope is better security, because nobody can get to this satellite in space, while being not more expensive necessarily.”<\/p>\n While a crypto satellite can be destroyed, the whole world would know the instant it has been tampered with. Communications between it and the ground can be monitored, and any rogue spacecraft approaching the CryptoSat in orbit would be picked up by the North-American Aerospace Defense Command<\/a> (NORAD) \u2014 which monitors the position of everything up there and makes the information freely available on the web.<\/p>\n Winetraub estimates the cost for a launch to be “less than $100,000 and dropping,” explaining further:<\/p>\n “The idea is that if you can provide a root of trust that is literally in outer space, you have something that has an unprecedented level of security because this is a fully tamper-proof Trusted Execution Environment.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\nWell that sounds expensive<\/h4>\n
You can\u2019t touch this<\/h4>\n