Controlling NASA with a Raspberry Pi

Posted by: DroneBot Workshop

Just saw this on the news:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48743043

It's amazing what people are using the Raspberry Pi for.  Remember, only use your Pi for good and not evil.

?

Bill

 

 

 

The RPI gives you a lot of opportunities that you had to invest a lot more in just a few years ago. Things like large parallel computers are one example.  With the cost of the PI and the community support you have, it's pretty easy and cheap. 

I run five separate networks in my home/home office/workshop to mitigate this risk. I do this using VLANs.

I am not sure if VLANs is available on all consumer grade hardware but they widely used on enterprise and commercial grade equipment. The prosumer line of network gear UniFi  uses VLANs.

VLANs are nice because they enable you to set up various types of network, each with its own restrictions on the same physical network. Personally, I use five VLANS Home, guest, IOT, Lab, and Admin.

Home is for normal home use. It provides unthrottled internet and access to the various printers and media servers. Most family and friend connect to home.

Guest is for guests who are just visiting. It provides throttled internet with no access to each other or internal network devices.

IOT is for semi-trusted IOT devices. It provides very throttled internet with predefined access to eachother and a single home automation server.

Lab is where the fun stuff happens. It provides internet access to only a few sites such as a NTP server and sites needed to update ubuntu. Devices have complete access to each other.

Admin is limited to a single physical computer and the various routers, switches and AP on the network.

The system works great. It should probably be the standard setup in most technical advanced homes and small offices. The downside is that it requires somewhat more expensive hardware and was a totally pain in the butt to set up. I went through a phase where I wanted to learn about network administration a few years ago.

It's actually quite scary that institutions like NASA are so vulnerable.  Lately in the news they've been talking about cyber warfare between nations.   The idea is to disrupt services like power grids, financial institutions, etc.  Thus throwing a technological society into instant chaos. 

I often wonder what would happen if our banking systems were corrupted to the point where everyone's debt was somehow erased or bank accounts were jumbled?  This could bring an entire national banking system to a screeching halt.

Technology is fun, and it's obviously very efficient to use as a tool.  But the dangers of being so thoroughly dependent on it are great.   If a Raspberry Pi in the hands of a hacker can bring down an entire power grid, or banking system, then how stable is our technology-dependent society?  We could basically be brought to our knees in just minutes of a serious cyber attack.

Technology is great.  But becoming entirely dependent upon it is not such a good idea.  But unfortunately that's precisely where we are at.

Just read that on BBC World myself.

Isn't it amazing to be able to infiltrate NASA and JPL with a 30 dollar computer?

Security is an interesting subject. People typically do very little of it themselves because it is inconvenient. Yet, we are in disbelief when something happens to someone else.

On a closely related note, forum.dronebotworkshop.com website no longer works on my home/office network because it uses unverified third-party tracking cookies.

It raises interesting questions. Should one allow questionable tracking cookies on their network in order to use the site (opening potential vectors) or should they just not use the site?

Judging by the BBC report, I have to conclude that the RasberryPi is not all it is cracked up to be!

The thing was attached to a JPL computer for over six months and only managed to collect and transmit 500MB of data.

That makes a 300 baud acoustic coupler faster! ? ? 

@twobits

What are the chances you might share your experience so we (meaning me!) might be able to divide our home networks in different vlans?  It's been on my bucket list since I retired (11 years now!) but I've just never gotten around to it!

Some of your network hardware for example and a high level diagram (not your details) of the way you implemented your vlans.

@codecage

I'll try to do a short write up on my setup. For those of us experimenting with network enable stuff, I think it is pretty important to segregate the network. Half the time I use the default passwords on things 'that will just take a minute.'

My guess is that is what happened at NASA.