> Here, we demonstrate a covert communications method in which photon emission is rapidly electrically modulated both above and below the level of a passive blackbody at the emitter temperature. The time-averaged emission can be designed to be identical to the thermal background, realizing communications with zero optical signature for detectors with bandwidth lower than the modulation frequency
It sounds like maybe they're modulating the emissivity of a diode up and down so that over time, its IR spectrum looks like black body radiation. Only someone looking at the intensity of the thermal radiation coming from the diode at really fast timescales (kilohertz or megahertz) would notice that there was a signal being transmitted.
> We do have encryption methods, but at the same time we’re always having to create new encryption methodologies when bad actors find new decryption strategies.
> But if someone doesn’t even know the data is being transferred, then it’s really very hard for them to hack into it. If you can send information secretly then it definitely helps to prevent it being acquired by people you don’t want to access it.
Very strange framing. Symmetric cryptography has been "unhackable" for a while now, for all intents and purposes. The real advantage is surely that nobody notices you're transmitting data at all?
The “emitter” can either produce more thermal photons than the background thermal noise or fewer. Because it absorbs thermal energy particles of the time and loses that energy at others, it balances out to background.
You have to know at what temporal frequency to sample to see it, otherwise the signal will integrate to zero. Very clever.
I don't understand what makes it hidden if anyone with the right equipment can pick it up. That's like calling X-rays hidden because most cameras can't pick them up.
Maybe I skipped over it, but the (suspected) narrow band emission of their diodes is something that could be detectable.
Electronic warfare is not about listening, but just seeing the location of the emitter. If you had someone with a different thermal camera/ camera with SWIR, you might see that something is just not right.
This is basically spread-spectrum / CDMA, but in a different frequency range? As others have mentioned in comments here, GPS signals are already far below the thermal noise floor.
Between 2013 and 2015 I was working on UWB (Ultra-Wideband-Radar).
It's stealth, undistinguishable from background noise too. Of course that depends on multiple attributes, but in general the signal can be understood like a chirp within multiple frequencies, thus looking non-linear and especially hard to detect, if there are multiple such devices additionally communicating with each other. Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) makes it even more efficient at being stealth, without diving too deep into it.
So this negative-light technology is quite interesting in that it's stealth, but it has to come a long way to reach the ubiquity of UWB. I'm curious if and how such technology could be used in space though. Happy to hear more!
One of the most plaguing questions I have is that it's very odd that specialists are so quite about the wide-spread integration of UWB chips in all modern phones and the accompanying "possible" surveillance nightmare. As a government it'd be total horror to be fully penetrated by an adversary like this. If you find otherwise please share the paper here, there's a lot of literature about UWB, OAM, beam-forming, antenna-design and related technology that, when put together easily make someone doubting it at least more inclined to be more open.
My work back then was sold to military by one of my professors behind my back, and after confronting the professor about it he laughed it off telling me it's normal and okay. I refused to publish about it, as I was finding it difficult to find a positive usage scenario, plus he was profiting of off my work that I needed for a grade financially outside of university and of course of no intention of integrating my work. To add salt to that wound he instructed me to change my applied-science paper to be more of a guide for a few select PhDs who'd receive the financial grants, making my work a footnote at best. I have no words. Later I learnt by a friend working on his Dr. degree how he got betrayed by his Dr Father. He was working on a science-backed improvement for a factory, after telling his Dr. Father he found that he patented the technology and sold it to the factory. When he found out, he heard a similar story to mine, where his Dr. Father basically told him, "lesson-learnt, better me than someone else". He finished his degree and kept his profile-low for years after that to not cause conflict.. quite sad.
My initial plan was to provide IPS to the campus with a few-cm accuracy and gesture recognition through walls as a cool gimmick with future work focusing on accessibility scenarios.
But with current devices it's possible to use the UWB chips in distributed mesh (similar to find-my) to create an ultra-high-resolution 3D-feed with city-wide, real-time and through-wall sensing at mm-accuracy. I'm not even factoring in resolution upgrades using AI.
Cook me, if you want, this was genuine scientific work taking months of work back in 2015 to be able to build, but being backstabbed by your professor was quite unreal to find out. Later I got similar signals from friends at Fraunhofer and Max-Planck. Just listening to their work stories made clear they were fooled doing science, when they in tandem were quite frankly building military reconnaissance technology, but distributed in small disconnect groups of low-paid scientists (PhD/Dr/MSc).
64 comments
From the abstract:
> Here, we demonstrate a covert communications method in which photon emission is rapidly electrically modulated both above and below the level of a passive blackbody at the emitter temperature. The time-averaged emission can be designed to be identical to the thermal background, realizing communications with zero optical signature for detectors with bandwidth lower than the modulation frequency
It sounds like maybe they're modulating the emissivity of a diode up and down so that over time, its IR spectrum looks like black body radiation. Only someone looking at the intensity of the thermal radiation coming from the diode at really fast timescales (kilohertz or megahertz) would notice that there was a signal being transmitted.
> We do have encryption methods, but at the same time we’re always having to create new encryption methodologies when bad actors find new decryption strategies.
> But if someone doesn’t even know the data is being transferred, then it’s really very hard for them to hack into it. If you can send information secretly then it definitely helps to prevent it being acquired by people you don’t want to access it.
Very strange framing. Symmetric cryptography has been "unhackable" for a while now, for all intents and purposes. The real advantage is surely that nobody notices you're transmitting data at all?
> Only a receiver with the right equipment can pick up the hidden message.
So all an eavesdropper has to do is setup the right equipment then? I guess it is only invisible until the technology becomes more widely available.
Electronic warfare is not about listening, but just seeing the location of the emitter. If you had someone with a different thermal camera/ camera with SWIR, you might see that something is just not right.
So this negative-light technology is quite interesting in that it's stealth, but it has to come a long way to reach the ubiquity of UWB. I'm curious if and how such technology could be used in space though. Happy to hear more!
One of the most plaguing questions I have is that it's very odd that specialists are so quite about the wide-spread integration of UWB chips in all modern phones and the accompanying "possible" surveillance nightmare. As a government it'd be total horror to be fully penetrated by an adversary like this. If you find otherwise please share the paper here, there's a lot of literature about UWB, OAM, beam-forming, antenna-design and related technology that, when put together easily make someone doubting it at least more inclined to be more open.
My work back then was sold to military by one of my professors behind my back, and after confronting the professor about it he laughed it off telling me it's normal and okay. I refused to publish about it, as I was finding it difficult to find a positive usage scenario, plus he was profiting of off my work that I needed for a grade financially outside of university and of course of no intention of integrating my work. To add salt to that wound he instructed me to change my applied-science paper to be more of a guide for a few select PhDs who'd receive the financial grants, making my work a footnote at best. I have no words. Later I learnt by a friend working on his Dr. degree how he got betrayed by his Dr Father. He was working on a science-backed improvement for a factory, after telling his Dr. Father he found that he patented the technology and sold it to the factory. When he found out, he heard a similar story to mine, where his Dr. Father basically told him, "lesson-learnt, better me than someone else". He finished his degree and kept his profile-low for years after that to not cause conflict.. quite sad.
My initial plan was to provide IPS to the campus with a few-cm accuracy and gesture recognition through walls as a cool gimmick with future work focusing on accessibility scenarios.
But with current devices it's possible to use the UWB chips in distributed mesh (similar to find-my) to create an ultra-high-resolution 3D-feed with city-wide, real-time and through-wall sensing at mm-accuracy. I'm not even factoring in resolution upgrades using AI.
Cook me, if you want, this was genuine scientific work taking months of work back in 2015 to be able to build, but being backstabbed by your professor was quite unreal to find out. Later I got similar signals from friends at Fraunhofer and Max-Planck. Just listening to their work stories made clear they were fooled doing science, when they in tandem were quite frankly building military reconnaissance technology, but distributed in small disconnect groups of low-paid scientists (PhD/Dr/MSc).