from Hacker News

Cisco aids Ukraine defense with modified switches to counter Russian attacks

by Logans_Run on 11/26/23, 10:57 PM with 85 comments

  • by technofiend on 11/26/23, 11:33 PM

    Politics aside, if there was ever a time for an Apollo-like moonshot program to build secure infrastructure and write secure code, it's now. Thanks to wide dissemination of techniques, Attack As A Service and even AI-assisted hacking, the bar to mount attacks just keeps getting lower. The real answer is to build resilient systems with zero backdoors rather than trying to put the hacking genie back in its proverbial bottle.

  • by mellow-lake-day on 11/26/23, 11:23 PM

    >The reliance of Ukraine’s substations on GPS for time synchronization, a standard in industrial control systems for its accuracy and affordability, becomes a vulnerability when faced with such jamming.

    >Cisco’s response involved shipping a large order of modified equipment, specifically designed to maintain accurate time even under radio jamming conditions. This solution employs the Cisco Industrial Ethernet switch with an internal crystal oscillator, enabling new clock recovery algorithms for accurate timekeeping when GPS is unavailable.

    That's really neat. Didn't know GPS was also used for time synchronization.

  • by 3np on 11/27/23, 3:25 AM

  • by instagib on 11/27/23, 4:08 AM

    So they put a rubidium oscillator in the Cisco boxes or upgraded their current equipment line.

    slide 15 has other solutions to gps denial. https://www.gps.gov/cgsic/meetings/2016/silverstein.pdf

    IEEE 1588-2008 is a good solution at 10 updates per second.

  • by hulitu on 11/27/23, 8:48 PM

    > Cisco aids Ukraine defense with modified switches to counter Russian attacks

    So they changed the password for the backdoor [1]. /s

    [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cisco-backdoor-hardcoded-a...

  • by secondary_op on 11/27/23, 7:05 AM

    Let's hear about offence Cisco puts out against US enemy states, or even against subordinate states just in case.